UK - LSi is saddened to report the passing of Jack Thompson, long-time technical director of the Manchester International Festival and one of the key forces behind Factory/Aviva Studios, the Festival’s new home base in the City.
Well known and hugely popular throughout the industry, Jack’s early years were spent in the lighting department of theatres including the Birmingham Rep, the Belgrade in Coventry, the Derby Playhouse and Manchester’s Library and Royal Exchange theatres, as well as freelancing across the country. He was the lighting designer for DV8 Physical Theatre through most of the 1990s, and was a project manager for White Light North from the mid 1990s to mid 2000s. Amongst his many projects at White Light was delivering the Northumberland Lights outdoor winter lighting scheme, the precursor to the many popular winter light trails of today.
His work as technical director of Manchester City of Drama during 1994 can perhaps now be seen as the ‘warm up’ for his time at the Manchester International Festival from its debut in 2007. Jack’s speciality between festivals became traversing the city on his bike tracking down unexpected or long-forgotten spaces to turn into remarkable venues for Festival shows; many of those venues have continued as performance spaces ever since. He also had a remarkable ability to never say no to an artist coming to the festival, no matter how crazy our outlandish the ideas presented to him. Instead, with his common sense, huge theatre experience, enquiring mind, expansive contact book and his trademark grin which was a powerful tool to winning people around to his side, he’d just find the solutions – often delivering more than had actually been asked for in the first place.
He was always quick to deflect praise to the rest of the team, but Factory – Aviva Studios as it finally became known – was very much Jack’s project, a physical realisation of that desire to be able to deliver anything an artist asked for. He was immensely proud of the end result – and, when interviewed about the place for LSi, was already plotting a network of Factory-style venues in other second cities around the world!
His passing at the weekend was totally unexpected, and enormously shocking particularly as he had recently stepped back from day-to-day involvement with the Festival in order to have more time to enjoy life.
Our thoughts are with his family, and his enormous theatrical family of friends and colleagues at Factory International and across the world.
