Peter Wood: Director who led the first production of The Birthday Party and did much fruitful work with Tom Stoppard

Several major British dramatists of the later 20th century had first or early plays directed by Peter Wood. It was his misfortune – if by no means solely his fault – that the premieres of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party and Joe Orton's Loot both entered the records as among the period's most notorious flops; by comparison his association with the work of Tom Stoppard (seven productions together) was buoyantly successful.

Wood directed also some outstanding classical work for the National Theatre and the RSC, as well as his West End work, alongside a busy career in opera internationally and a significant body of television work.

A strong streak of showmanship often stamped his productions. Wood relished large forces on stage; he directed the mass-hysteria scenes of John Whiting's The Devils, the spiralling comedic complexities of Stoppard's version of Nestroy in On the Razzle and the panorama of Arthur Miller's The American Clock with bravura flair, often matching precision-timed action to superbly selected music (once he described the stage as "an elaborate stringed instrument" demanding the perfect meshing of sound, light and spectacle).

With his imposing physical presence and authoritative manner ("The Commander" was one nickname) he was not universally adored by actors, but he directed most of the major stars of his era and was signally successful with some of the stage's thoroughbreds, Maggie Smith and John Wood among them.

A Devon boy, Wood was a precocious schoolboy in Taunton and had a clear path to Downing College, Cambridge, where he was part of a golden undergraduate theatrical group including Peter Hall. After a spell in repertory theatre, including Oxford Playhouse where his productions included Pinero's The Magistrate (with the young Maggie Smith in a small role), Wood was appointed Director of London's adventurous Arts Theatre in 1956.

He created something of a stir in a staid theatre world still to be jolted by the New Wave with productions of Ionesco's then-startling The Bald Prima Donna and The New Tenant (1956). Less successful was Mervyn Peake's The Wit to Woo (Arts, 1957), when Wood missed the authentic Peake tone, apart from the glitteringly malevolent performance of Kenneth Williams as a Jonsonian valet. Major success came with O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh (Arts and Winter Garden, 1958), charged with a powerful emotional wattage, boosted by Ian Bannen's searing performance as the doomed Hickey.

On leaving the Arts, Wood took on for an emerging young producer, Michael Codron, the first produced full-length play from Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party (1958). Its brief pre-London tour was encouraging, marking Pinter as a striking new voice, but its Lyric, Hammersmith opening was mauled by virtually every London critic and it closed after a single, thinly attended week. Pinter had never been at ease with Wood or the production.

After some lauded classical work, especially a taut production of Schiller's Mary Stuart (Old Vic, 1958) and a fizzing As You Like It in Canada (Stratford, Ontario, 1959) Wood first directed at Stratford with a somewhat stately The Winter's Tale (1960). His stock at the RSC soared with his dynamic production of The Devils (Aldwych, 1961) although both Hamlet (Stratford, 1961) with an uneasily-cast Bannen (the press savaged this production) and The Beggar's Opera (Aldwych, 1963), decidedly dark and undersung in a convict-ship setting, were misfires.

Wood scored with Peter Shaffer's larky double bill The Private Ear and The Public Eye (Globe, 1962 and New York, 1963) with Maggie Smith luminous as a wrongly suspected wife in the second play opposite Kenneth Williams' macaroon-munching detective.

Stars – Michael Redgrave struggling with his lines in The Master Builder (National, 1964), Ralph Richardson glassily adrift as the obsessed sculptor of Graham Greene's Carving a Statue (Haymarket, 1964) and Alec Guinness at his most sonorously sacerdotal in Arthur Miller's plodding Incident at Vichy (Phoenix, 1966) – all proved tough going for Wood. On Broadway, Jean Kerr's anorexic comedy Poor Richard (965) defeated his and Alan Bates' talents.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Wyndham's, 1966), with Vanessa Redgrave mesmerising as Muriel Spark's riven romantic, survived its lumpy adaptation in Wood's fluid staging, and then he delivered one of his finest productions, Congreve's Love for Love (National, 1967). A de luxe cast including Olivier helped, and Wood's production evidenced his loving understanding of Restoration Comedy, acutely funny and on occasion heart-stoppingly moving.

A lacklustre production of Coward's Design for Living (Los Angeles, 1971) reunited Wood with Maggie Smith before he returned for his first Stoppard, Jumpers (National, 1972). Revived several times – including Wood's 1985 reappraisal with Paul Eddington and Felicity Kendal – that first showing, with Michael Hordern' opposite Diana Rigg's luscious, lost Dottie, remains a landmark of that period.

Similarly dazzling pyrotechnics fused his production of Stoppard's Travesties (RSC 1974, New York 1975). The ideal author/director collaboration – Wood became closely involved with the scripts' developments – continued on Night and Day (Phoenix 1978, New York 1979), a high-wire marriage of neo-Shavian comedy and press-freedom drama starring Diana Rigg in London and Maggie Smith on Broadway.

On the long-running West End production of The Real Thing (Strand, 1982) Wood highlighted Stoppard's intricate Pirandellian structure; mostly praised in London, his work fell foul (unfairly so) of the New York Times critic Frank Rich, leading to Wood's replacement by Mike Nichols for Broadway.

Hapgood (Aldwych, 1988) saw Wood in top form as he handled Stoppard's complex but utterly absorbing tale of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and double-agents. Its opening sequence showed the director at his virtuoso peak, staging a near-ballet of briefcase-swapping espionage to Bach's B Minor Suite. Equally impressive was a lambent production of Stoppard's play of the Raj, Indian Ink (Aldwych, 1995), thoroughly reworked from its radio origins into a fascinating exploration of time and memory, the staging again enhanced by Wood's use of music, this time from Indian flutes.

Though not by nature an institutions man (he saw in himself "a streak of irresponsibility a mile wide") he agreed to be an Associate Director at the National under Peter Hall in the 1980s, directing A Threepenny Opera (1982), and then a splendid reclamation of Miller's Broadway failure, The American Clock (1986), which used Depression-era music to potent effect.

For the National, Wood also had happy returns to Restoration Comedy with The Provok'd Wife (1980) with John Wood and The Beaux' Stratagem (1989) with Brenda Blethyn a glowing Mrs Sullen. The South Bank also saw him reunited with Michael Hordern (memorably tetchy as he attacked his breakfast egg) for a joyous The Rivals (1983), a master-class in handling the Olivier Theatre stage.

Wood had mixed fortunes in the opera house. He had success with an elegant Cosi fan Tutte (Santa Fe, 1977), but Don Giovanni (Covent Garden, 1981) and a heavy Il Seraglio for Glyndebourne (1988), were disappointments. His sole foray into big-budget musicals, Windy City (Victoria Palace, 1982), was strongly cast and staged with characteristic invention, but it was based on a play (The Front Page) which benefited not at all from musicalisation.

In Search of Gregory (1968), a much-trumpeted rites-of-passage story marked Wood's big-screen debut, but its box-office failure led to few worthwhile offers. His 1960s television career was more successfully crowded; in the heady days for drama on both ITV and BBC he directed many single plays – Donald Howarth's gentle Lily in Little India was especially fine – and later he steered the series The Life of Shakespeare (1978). He also directed several lavish, star-laden classics for television, including a highly romantic Hamlet (1962), with Richard Chamberlain's dewy-eyed Prince.

Like many leading directors, Wood found stage offers thin on the ground in later years. He directed a genial She Stoops to Conquer for Chichester (1993), and at the same address demonstrated that he was one of the few directors around capable of handling the sweep of Victorian melodrama with an exhilarating revival of Henry Arthur Jones's The Silver King (1990).

In his later years Wood lived in a beautiful barn conversion on which, like its garden, he had worked extensively, back in his adored West Country, in Somerset.

Peter Lawrence Wood, director: born 8 October 1925; died 11 February 2016.