Adventurer: Bernard Miles and the Mermaid Theatre

The remarkable story of a theatrical visionary and the theatre he fought to create

Bernard Miles was an actor, writer, director, life peer and one of the great theatrical adventurers of the twentieth century. In 1959, together with his wife, the actor and director Josephine Wilson, he opened the Mermaid Theatre at Puddle Dock: the first new theatre to be built in the City of London for centuries.

Created from the remains of a bomb-damaged riverside warehouse, the Mermaid became one of post-war British theatre’s most distinctive and influential venues. Its open stage, adventurous programming and direct relationship between performers and audience helped shape a new generation of British theatres.

In Adventurer, acclaimed theatre director and biographer Alan Strachan tells the extraordinary story of Bernard Miles and the Mermaid Theatre — its triumphs, crises, eccentric personalities and constant battles for survival.

From Miles’s early career on stage and screen to his celebrated performances in In Which We Serve, Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickleby and The Man Who Knew Too Much, Strachan follows the development of a gifted, contradictory and fiercely determined man whose greatest ambition was to make theatre accessible to everyone.

At the Mermaid, Miles revitalised neglected classics, championed new writing and staged productions including Lock Up Your Daughters, Brecht’s The Life of Galileo, Treasure Island, The Bed Sitting Room and the original production of Alfie. The theatre also nurtured artists including Lionel Bart, Sean Kenny, Spike Milligan, John Neville and Simon Callow.

Whether Miles was performing Long John Silver with a parrot on his shoulder, devising improbable fundraising schemes or attempting to persuade the City of London to support his latest theatrical vision, his life was filled with audacity, invention and risk.

Drawing on unpublished research, personal recollections and Strachan’s own experience of working at the Mermaid for six years, Adventurer presents Bernard Miles in all his complexity: inspiring and infuriating, idealistic and impractical, troublesome and deeply loved.

It is also the story of a theatre unlike any other — and an important, often overlooked chapter in the history of post-war British culture.

“This full, rich and enthralling account of the making of one of the British theatre’s great figures is long overdue. Bernard was one of its most important – and most original – standard bearers, for whom we have much to be grateful, as any reader of this riveting book will discover.”

— Simon Callow

Longlisted for the Society for Theatre Research Theatre Book Prize 2024

Perfect for readers interested in:

British theatre history, actor biographies, post-war London, theatre architecture, arts leadership, cultural history and the personalities who shaped the modern British stage.