Gordon Dickerson

Gordon Dickerson (19**-) is a London based literary and theatrical agent.

Biography

Born in in Kingston, London, and at the age of 3 months he and his mother joined his father in Libya, where he was working as an air traffic controller. His brother and sister were born in Libya and they then moved to Cyprus and later to Aden. Whilst living in Aden, he started school in Sussex, England at the age of 8, and would re-join the family in Aden and then Kenya during the school holidays. The family returned to the UK and they lived in Northampton where he went to the local comprehensive school. When they moved to Brighton Gordon attended Varndean Grammar School and, at the age of 18, he went to Southampton University where he gained a BA (Hons) in Modern History and Politics. Whilst at Southampton he directed a production of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull and appeared in several plays including Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead. little knowing that a few years later I would be promoting that very play and all Stoppard’s other works when I joined his agent Kenneth Ewing at Fraser & Dunlop Scripts Limited!

Reveal the date of my birth!!!! You are welcome to include the information about Kenneth.

Reza is my own South African client and that came about through Steven’s introduction. I attach a list of the writers I represent several of whom have had plays performed in South Africa produced by Pieter Toerien or long ago by the then various Performing Arts Councils – Pieter has recently expressed interest in FAMILY SECRETS by the Italian playwright Enrico Luttmann, a new play that is taking Europe by storm!

On graduating began to work in various capacities front of house at The Theatre Royal, Brighton. After 7 months he landed a job as the assistant to the theatre producer at The Robert Stigwood Organisation in Brook Street, London, where he worked on shows such as Jesus Christ Superstar at the Palace Theatre, Evita at the Prince Edward Theatre, the London premiere of Steven Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd at Drury Lane and a very short lived show from Australia at the Phoenix Theatre.

As his job became more precarious, he left the company to travel to New York, hoping to land a job there, but a few months later an opportunity arose back in London at the Literary Agency, Fraser and Dunlop Scripts Ltd in Regent Street. After a stint as temporary assistant to the managing director, he was offered a full time job as an agent with specific responsibility for promoting the agencies stage plays regionally in the UK and overseas.

It was here he met the theatre agent Kenneth Ewing, who would become his life partner. They were together for 27 years.

A few years later the agency merged with another and the newly combined organisation PFD moved to new offices in Chelsea Harbour. By the early nineteen nineties he felt in need of some kind of change and decided to leave the agency, but was persuaded by a number of clients, including John Osborne, to set up on his own and to represent them.

He did so in 1994 and has operated as an independent literary agent, since then. occasionally acquiring new clients, but always trying to ensure that he had only as many writers and plays as he could cope with as a one man operation. He observes that as retirement beckons the work of placing new plays by unknown authors has become much more difficult in the UK. For example, although there is still a great demand for well written small cast comedies in Europe, there is little outlet for these in the UK - certainly not enough to generate an ongoing income for writers. There are opportunities for writers in other areas such as film and television, of course, but it has become very difficult for most writers to be able to sustain a career from their writing. In addition, the world has moved on so much in the last few years that even terrific plays written in the seventies and eighties let alone those from the fifties and sixties bear little resemblance to the lives we all now lead.

Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance

Gordon Dickerson is the international agent for the South African playwrights Reza de Wet, Steven Stead

Sources

Personal submission by Gordon Dickerson (6 September, 2018)

Go to the ESAT Bibliography

Return to

Return to ESAT Personalities D

Return to South African Theatre Personalities

Return to The ESAT Entries

Return to Main Page