Joel Cutrara obituary | Theatre

November 2020 · 3 minute read
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Joel Cutrara obituary

Joel Cutrara, who has died aged 83, was my partner in the Phantom Captain theatre company from 1972 to 1987, during the heyday of British alternative theatre. He wrote, acted, directed, sound-designed and drove the company van.

Born and raised in Chicago, Joel was the son of Betty and August Cutrara, who separated not long after his birth. Betty and Joel kept moving around during his childhood, apparently to avoid August finding them.

Joel did national service as a military policeman, then studied acting and improvisation at the Goodman theatre, Chicago. He worked in local radio as a staff announcer and, from 1962, in advertising agencies in the UK, US and in India. In London he met Sunita Nalwani and they married in 1964. Joel became a partner in a London advertising agency, handling a variety of accounts from surgical catgut to dog food.

In 1972, Joel and I met at a party, where we improvised execrable lyrics to a live jazz band. We hit it off and Joel became my principal collaborator in the Phantom Captain (later also with Peter Godfrey), producing a variety of bizarre/surreal performance events, including stage plays, slide shows, street theatre, immersive “environ-mentals”, workshops and exhibitions.

Joel Cutrara at the King’s Head in 1977. Photograph: Bruce Hart

Our stage productions included Secretians (1975), a nauticultural religious service; Loaded Questions (1977), scripted entirely in questions; The Changeness Congress (1977), a musical about particle physics; and Abracadabra Honeymoon (1980), a full-length love scene, described by Michael Billington in the Guardian as “that rarest of theatrical phenomena: a show about sex that is witty, playful and erotic …”

We performed in a wide variety of venues and unusual outside locations. Ours was the first alternative theatre company to play Brixton prison and the National Theatre.

Along with 40 other companies, we lost our Arts Council grant in 1980. Joel diversified, working as a freelance computer troubleshooter; as a bit player in film and TV productions such as Reds (1981), Ragtime (1981), Insignificance (1985); and Edge of Darkness (1985), and as a voiceover artist. However, he suffered from periodic depression and ill-health and became increasingly reclusive.

Joel is remembered by most of his friends and fellow performers as a big personality – a warm, witty, imaginative, bawdy agent provocateur with a soulful, poetic streak and a keen sense of life’s absurdities. Some of his performance work is preserved in two ACGB-sponsored films, Performance Art (1975) and The Phantom Captain Appears (1978).

He is survived by Sunita, from whom he had been separated for many years, their son Zia, and three grandchildren, Caiomhe, Yasmin and Samir. Joel’s son Rafiq predeceased him.

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