Stephen MacDonald

A fine director, determined manager, much-loved mentor and insightful playwright, he was, above all, an outstanding actor. His contribution to Scotland's current theatrical vitality was critical.

Brought up in Birmingham, MacDonald trained at the Birmingham School of Acting. By the early 1960s, he was playing leading roles, including Hamlet at Salisbury Playhouse, and working with leading touring companies such as Prospect.

He held his family's Scottish roots dear and when, in 1963, he first appeared at the Citizens' Theatre in Pygmalion, his being cast as Higgins, aged only 30 emphasised his early promise. He appeared regularly in the legendary 1960s seasons of Iain Cuthbertson and the two Michaels, Meacham and Blakemore, playing a number of leading roles opposite Anne Kristen, Eliza to his Higgins.

MacDonald's insight and deep intelligence drew him to directing. In 1971, during the resident director's sabbatical, he directed the Leicester Phoenix (earlier the first directing base of another great Scottish theatre figure, Clive Perry).

Success there led to him taking up the position in late 1972 as artistic director of Dundee Rep, then temporarily based in a dilapidated former church on Lochee Road. His Dundee seasons were admired and deeply influential on contemporary Scottish theatre development. Working with established actors such as Callum Mill, Martin Heller, Peter Laird, Janet Michael, Jan Wilson, Clare Richards and young actors such as Gregor Fisher, Maureen Beattie and Ron Bain, he established an ensemble 25 years before the current Dundee one, presenting international, classic and new work.

He launched the process towards the new Dundee Rep's 1981 opening. Robert Robertson, his assistant and successor as director, rightly receives praise for seeing through that project, but MacDonald got it going in what John Faulkner, SAC drama director at the time, called "rough, tough negotiations".

As Perry's successor at the Royal Lyceum in 1976, MacDonald developed his Dundee policies. James Cairncross and John Grieve joined the company and he continued developing young actors such as Philip Franks, while the stable of playwrights he was nurturing included key figures like Hector MacMillan, Stewart Conn, Tom Gallacher and more.

Seasons at Dundee comprised 43% new writing, while at the Lyceum - which he left in 1979 - that percentage was an astonishing 45% in radical seasons, including international classics in fresh productions. His 1978-9 season produced even more new Scottish work in a successful season that would now be unimaginably pioneering. Maureen Beattie, still cherishing the opportunity to play Rosalind in As You Like It very early in her career, summarises his mentoring skills as ability to spot talent, trust his judgment and stretch that talent.

Meantime, his writing developed. Fine adaptations of Marlowe (All Ayre and Fire, 1978), Kipling (Kipling's Jungle Book, 1979) and work for radio emerged, but his high point was Not About Heroes, exploring the friendship of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon following their First World War meeting in Edinburgh's Craiglockhart Military Hospital. The work encapsulates not just friendship, but the technical nature of the creative relationship of writers to writing, something MacDonald as actor, director and writer fully understood.

Winning a 1982 Edinburgh Festival Fringe First, the play transferred to the King's Head Theatre in London and was revived at the National Theatre in 1986 when MacDonald was part of the remarkable year-long Cottesloe Theatre company led by Ian McKellen and Edward Petherbridge. It continues to be produced across the world.

After the Lyceum, while MacDonald appeared on television, he focused on his first love: stage acting. He kept returning to the Citizens', settling in Edinburgh in the mid-1990s. He was a generous actor - "fun to act with", said Martin Heller - while Giles Havergal described him as "a class act, brilliantly understated". For the Citz under the triumvirate, he appeared often, including key roles in The Vortex (1988), which transferred to London's West End; Major Barbara (1992, an outstanding Undershaft), the millennium production of Coward's Cavalcade (1999, as Robert Marryot) and Venice Preserved (2003).

MacDonald was a private man, even at times solitary, though never lonely. He was widely read, kind and knowledgeable. I remember driving him to Troy, where he wandered and pondered on his own, but was also able, drawing on intimate knowledge of Homer's Iliad, to show me the city's topography.

He was sometimes spikily honest, but was always a warmly faithful friend. By Ian Brown