Jules Wright: First resident female director at the Royal Court who went on to become the visionary creator of the Wapping Project

Her struggle was not just with the male-dominated arts world of the 1980s but against a regime starving political theatre of its funding

Wright in 1991: she was fearless, at one point taking the Arts Council to court over spending cuts (Rex)

We occupy a society which is still a long way short of being equal, even in the supposedly progressive realm of the arts. Enormous strides have been made in the past few decades, however, and in theatre one of the most inspiring crusaders was the director and impresario Jules Wright.

Wright was the first resident female director at the Royal Court (and, staggeringly, only the second woman to direct on the main stage there), having previously worked at another theatre that stood for bold, anti-establishment work, the Theatre Royal at Stratford East. But her struggle was not just with the male-dominated arts world of the 1980s. It was also a struggle against a regime that was starving political theatre of its funding. The Thatcher government was hardly likely to be sympathetic to critical political theatre, but Wright was fearless, at one point taking the Arts Council to court over funding cuts.

Speaking in 1990, she suggested that the problem was as much one of perception: "The energy of political theatre in this country hasn't dissipated, but male writers are always associated with major political statements, and the really radical work is now coming from women".

Wright's background may not have been theatrical but it was dramatic. Born in Melbourne in 1948, she was adopted by a working-class couple in Adelaide who stubbornly refused to tell her anything of her origins. Eventually, a bitter court case led to her discovering her birth name, but nothing else.

She married her childhood sweetheart, Josh Wright, in 1968, and although they did divorce, they remained close and remarried four days before her death from cancer. After she studied educational psychology at Adelaide University, her first career was as a teacher, but the interest in theatre that had seen her directing plays at school and university was frustrated by the city only having one rep, and so the couple moved to Britain in 1973, prompted by the opportunity it gave Josh to dodge the Vietnam war draft in Australia.

Compared to her native country, which had been politicised by the proximity of that conflict, and which had seen swifter progress in the feminist movement, she initially found Britain dispiriting. Settling in Bristol, where her husband worked as an architect, she completed a year-long postgraduate course at the university's drama department, then moved to the psychology department, where she devised groundbreaking work with psychiatric patients, employing drama within family therapy, which led to a PhD thesis exploring the connections between behaviour, gesture and setting.

She turned down a place at Rada to become an assistant director at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, where Clare Venables had just settled into the difficult task of succeeding Joan Littlewood. Venables observed at the time that directing was still considered a man's world, since it required strong leadership and steady nerves in times of crisis, qualities which it was supposed women did not possess. She interviewed Wright in the KFC at Stratford and offered her a three-month trial.

Wright's first production as director was Nick Darke's A Tickle on the River's Back (1979), a fine work, on the surface about three generations of bargemen on the Thames but deepening into a piece as much about fatherhood as about the dereliction of London's docklands. Wright established herself quickly, and arrived at the Royal Court in 1983 to direct the fiercely accusatory Masterpieces by Sarah Daniels, a play which expressed all the anger of the feminist anti-pornography movement of the time in one sustained roar from one of the most brutal and exciting voices of the era.

From the Royal Court she co-founded the Women's Playhouse Trust in 1984. For their opening production she directed a telling revival of The Lucky Chance, written by the 17th century female playwright Aphra Behn. The production exemplified Wright's skill at identifying strong and original female voices, in this case one that had been neglected for 300 years, and her skill at locating strong and original female actors (in the cast was the mighty but then little-known Harriet Walter).

It also showcased Wright's fascinating methodology, which was to approach a text with an allowance that one brings one's own ideals to a reading, but also a complete resistance to preconceptions. "With a classic text actors are often dealing with received ideas," she explained, and she worked hard to destroy them and view a text with today's eyes and not yesterday's prejudices.

Wright became deputy artistic director of the Royal Court in the late 1980s, but was growing hungry for a project she could have complete control over, and so, after turning down the opportunity to run Sydney Opera House, and buoyed by the triumph of having turned around a £179,000 deficit as one of the Artistic Directors of the Liverpool Playhouse between 1984 and 1987, in 1993 she bought a disused Grade II listed hydraulic power station in now-regenerated Wapping. The Wapping Project became a restaurant, gallery and performance space, designed by her husband.

Her fearlessness made it an exciting place, the gastronomy funding the creativity and Wright's eye for quality still gleaming in work such as sculptor Richard Wilson's "Butterfly" (2003), which over four weeks saw the regeneration of a wrecked aircraft, and Wright's own dreamy exploration of childhood's fascination with the dressing-up box, "Fashion, Film and Fiction" (2005).

The Wapping Project exhausted her, but it was a splendid final achievement in a dogged career which will have a lasting significance on theatre, sculpture, fashion, feminism, and even food. As she once explained, "it doesn't matter if only three people turn up to see what you're doing, so long as you believe in it. A decade down the line the other millions who see it will realise they should have been there".

Alexandra Vesty (Jules Wright), theatre director and arts impresario: born Melbourne 25 February 1948; married 1968 Josh Wright (marriage dissolved, remarried 2015); died London 21 June 2015.