Hands, Terry (1941-2020), was a British theater and opera director. Hands was involved in the artistic administration of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) between 1966 and 1991. He joined the Royal National Theatre as a freelance stage director in 1994 to direct William Shakespeare’s comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor and to revive Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest.
Terence David Hands was born on Jan. 9, 1941, in Aldershot. In 1964, he helped found the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool and, in 1966, he joined the RSC as director of its small-scale touring operation, Theatreground. He became the RSC’s associate director in 1967, and then joint artistic director with the British director Trevor Nunn in 1978. From 1986 to 1991, Hands was the RSC’s sole artistic director and chief executive. From 1975 to 1980, Hands was a consultant director with France’s Comedie Francaise and also directed performances of Shakespeare’s plays at the Burgtheater in Vienna, Austria.
Among Hands’s best-known RSC productions were Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (1982) and Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1983), both starring the British actor Derek Jacobi, and Shakespeare’s Othello (1985), which starred the British actor Ben Kingsley. In 1988, Hands directed, produced, and designed a musical called Carrie, based on a 1974 horror novel by the American writer Stephen King. Hands also directed operas in several European opera houses. He died on Feb. 4, 2020.
