WHERE do we go now?
Liverpool theatre-goers asked themselves that question as the last of the Everyman founder-directors, Peter James, moved on from Hope Street in 1970.
Would the raw and radical Everyman join the establishment? Would it even survive?
The grey eminence behind the early Everyman was the Liverpool teacher, lecturer and academic Alan Durband, and there was no way that he would have allowed the theatre to stagnate. His choice for the new artistic head was Alan Dossor, who has died aged 74.
It was an inspired appointment, cementing Dossor's reputation as a director and Durband's as a talent-spotter.
In five years, Dossor blazed a trail that set British theatre alight. It helped, of course, to have a permanent repertory company in Hope Street. Dossor was able to assemble a company of players who fed off each other, who worked together, lived together, drank together and, on occasions, slept together.
Alan Dossor
Forty years later, the Everyman company of the early 1970s reads like a roll-call of theatrical greats. Jonathan Pryce, Anthony Sher, Julie Walters, Bill Nighy, Peter Postlethwaite, Matthew Kelly, Bernard Hill...the list goes on.
And it wasn't just acting talent: Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale were key members of the writing team as was the Wirral playwright John McGrath, who had cut his teeth on the BBC Z-Cars team.
Dossor understood what made the city's population tick and was not afraid to attack the political establishment to bring them into the Hope Street theatre, commissioning plays about local issues and scandals.
Dossor and his team could hardly do wrong. A so-so King Lear was lifted to another plane by Jonathan Pryce as Gloucester and Anthony Sher as the Fool
His first show at the helm was The Braddocks' Time, which set the theme for the years that followed: radical, musical and bursting with energy.
Bessie Braddock had been an indefatigable Labour MP and city councillor from the 1930s onward and the newspaper headline "Battling Bessie" could have been written for her. By 1970s she was a national institution, and although The Braddocks Time seemed an unlikely musical subject for the story of Bessie and her husband, Jack, it proved to be a smash hit - given an extra boost by Bessie's death during the show's run.
It seemed as if Dossor and his team could hardly do wrong. A so-so King Lear was lifted to another plane by Jonathan Pryce as Gloucester and Anthony Sher as the Fool, while Pryce came into his own as an inspired Richard III.
Sher, meanwhile, transmogrified into the radical rightwinger Enoch Powell wearing a leopard skin in Tarzan's Last Stand.
It was a dizzying ride for performers and audiences alike. Barbara Dickson and the young Russell launched their careers with John Paul, George, Ringo...and Bert (an eventual West End transfer), and it was Russell who wrote the last product of Dossor's years as artistic director, Breezeblock Park.
The closure of the Everyman for refurbishment in the mid-1970s seemed like a natural break. Chris Bond, who had written Tarzan's Last Stand, took over as artistic director, and the Everyman just went on getting better and better.
Alan Dossor went on to a distinguished career in film and television, taking many of the Everyman company with him.
Early TV works included Pickersgill People featuring many of the Everyman actors, including Anthony Sher playing a Sheik.
Alan Dossor directing Will's GirlsOne of his finest accomplishments was The Muscle Market, an Alan Bleasedale-penned Play for Today set in Liverpool, 1980, with Pete Postlethwaite and Alison Steadman - again breaking new ground in a TV landscape dominated by "twee sitcoms" as Postlethwaite later recalled.
Dossor directed over 50 subsequent productions for TV, working with actors such as Warren Clarke, Timothy Spall, Neil Pearson, Prunella Scales, Stephanie Beacham and Patricia Routledge. He later moved back to the theatre, directing, among other things, a series of plays at West Yorkshire Playhouse for Jude Kelly.
Although in the last year his health was failing, he was said to be delighted by the news that the Everyman was to form a rep company again and wished it "all power".
Veteran actors, veteran theatre-goers, meanwhile, can still get a bit misty-eyed at the drop of just three words: The Dossor Years.
*Alan Dossor, born Kingston Upon Hull, September 19, 1941. Died August 7, 2016.
