TRIBUTE TO THE LIFE OF RICHARD MOORE
August 1945 – August 2026
Richard Moore, who died on 20th August 2026, was quite simply the rock on which the success of the current Loft Theatre Company was built. While actors and others receive well-deserved plaudits for their brilliant achievements, Richard gave so much time, effort, and creativity to the Loft in so many fields – and he did it discreetly, generously, and with consummate skill. Richard was a man of so many talents, and he applied these to his work at the Loft – as an actor, a director, a designer, a set-builder, a stage manager, an archivist, and a long-standing member of the company’s governing body.
Before joining the Loft, Richard had been involved first with the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham and then became part of the RSC drama school training programme. His life at the Loft began as an actor in the leading role in Relatively Speaking by Alan Ayckbourn in 1969, and he went on to play another 42 roles. His involvement deepened very quickly when he directed the first of his eight Loft productions with Lloyd George Knew My Father by William Douglas-Home in 1975 and he soon became the company’s Artistic Director. Richard joined the Management Committee in 1973 and, with only a short break, remained on the Committee and then the Board of Trustees until June this year.
The second half of Richard’s life at the Loft saw a shift in his creative involvement as he embraced set design and construction. His first Loft design in 2000 was for No Sex Please, We’re British by Anthony Marriott and Alistair Foot. He rapidly became Head of Set Design, designing around 80% of the productions each season. A perfectionist, directors have paid tribute to his unique ability to work with them and embrace the individual and distinctive demands of a text and how it will serve the actors. His versatility can be seen through the range of plays he designed – from Pinter to Chekhov, and from Oscar Wilde to his final magnificent design this year for our enormously successful production of Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors. During this time, Richard was involved in set construction and gave such crucial support to our Production Managers. The physical work of set construction can be demanding, but Richard’s commitment to this task was continuous, even when he reached the age of eighty!
It is impossible to imagine the Loft without Richard – his talent, his skills, his dedication, his loyalty, his dry sense of humour, and his support for so many of us. The person he supported most of all, of course, was Sue, enabling her to be the magnificent Artistic Director that she is. Sue and Richard met in 1970 at the Loft and they married in 1972. We send deepest sympathies to Sue, together with our assurance that she will be in the thoughts of the entire Loft community now and in the times ahead.
David Fletcher, August 2026
