The actor William Hoyland, who has died aged 73, was a stalwart of the plays edited from public inquiries or trials that Nicolas Kent directed at the Tricycle theatre in Kilburn, north-west London. The texts were realised by the great band of Tribunal Players, as we came to call them. For those that I provided, Bill played John Major in Half the Picture (1994, about the Scott inquiry), Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel in Nuremberg (1996), the confrontational detective John Davidson in The Colour of Justice (1999, about the murder of Stephen Lawrence), and Colonel Derek Wilford, the unapologetic Paras commander in Bloody Sunday (2005).
In Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom (2004), compiled by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, he “spookily” donned “the mantle and manner” of Donald Rumsfeld, the US defense secretary, wrote Nicholas de Jongh in the Evening Standard. After a West End transfer, the play was later read in the US Congress.
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