My friend Neil Hornick, who has died aged 85, was a co-founder in 1970 of the Phantom Captain experimental theatre company, which operated with Arts Council funding until 2006.
Neil was Phantom Captain’s full-time artistic director for the entire period, overseeing productions of a wide range of groundbreaking work, including plays, mock lectures, improvised performances, immersive and street theatre, encounter workshops, residential projects and early video-based events.
From the mid-1980s until his death he also offered his services as a literary consultant to aspiring writers under the pseudonym Robert Lambolle, assessing and editing their manuscripts. Among his clients was the author Joanne Harris, best known for her 1999 novel Chocolat, who was a teacher when she first approached him for help. For a period during the 80s he also taught theatre studies to visiting American students attached to the University of Maryland.
Neil was born in London to Ben Hornick, a lithographer, and Lily (nee Phillips), a housewife. He did his secondary schooling at Christ’s College Finchley, then gained a degree in psychology at University College London. After a period travelling abroad he studied for a postgraduate certificate in drama at Bristol University from 1965 to 1966, and became involved in experimental theatre from then onwards.
I met Neil in 2003 when I asked him, in his literary consultant role, to advise me on a manuscript I had written. I found it impossible to get an obscure allusion past the beady-eyed fellow: “Call me an ignoramus if you will,” he would say, “but if I don’t know what it means then there’s a chance that others won’t know either.” One of his key principles was that “a good editor must have the courage of his or her own ignorance”.
Neil’s extensive archives related to the Phantom Company were acquired by the British Library in 2022. Two years later The Magic Eye, a book he had written many years previously about the cinematography of Stanley Kubrick, was finally published, and there were tears in the author’s eyes when he held a copy in his hands.
He is survived by wife, Savka, and their children, Gallin and Maya.
