My friend Peter Harris, who has died aged 50 of pancreatic cancer, was director and co-founder of Wolf and Water Arts Company.

Peter was born in Worcester, the son of Muriel (nee Lerry), a primary school teacher, and Walter Harris, who worked for the Prudential and WH Smith. Peter’s many childhood explorations included an expressionist approach to music – he preferred striking a guitar with knives and screwdrivers rather than playing it with his fingers.

He attended Rainbow Hill primary school and Worcester Royal grammar school before studying humanities at Thames Polytechnic (now part of Greenwich University). On finishing his degree, Peter returned to Worcester, volunteering at the Worcester Arts Workshop. Offered a place with the arts group the Common Sense Project at the Beaford Arts Centre, he moved to Devon in 1989, and in 1991 set up independently, as Wolf and Water Arts Company, in Tavistock, with Philip Robinson, Steve Newton and Jess Shaw.

In the Common Sense Project, Peter oversaw integrated casts of people with learning difficulties, school groups, volunteers and professionals, devising and staging community theatre. With Wolf and Water the projects diversified. With Peter directing, Wolf and Water shot a groundbreaking version of Macbeth (1995), with an integrated cast, on 16mm. Channel 4 called it “an extraordinary and admirably ambitious piece of work”.

Peter also used drama in conflict resolution in Northern Ireland and, from 2000, the western Balkans, therapeutically in prisons, and with those suffering from life-threatening illnesses and with mental health issues.

A thin, spectacled figure of shorn hair and indefatigable purpose, Peter would rise early to write up the notes for the day in his spiky handwriting while smoking roll-ups and listening to strange sounds. Scruffy, uncompromising, yet always people-centred, Peter was known for his twinkly-eyed gallows humour, eliciting groans and, “Peter, you’re a bad man!” from people who felt quite the opposite. To work with Peter was to have made an unforgettable friend. Those drawn into his orbit often found their tastes and thinking transformed.

Music was a lifelong passion, whether in the band he fronted, The Temple of Photocopier Consciousness, whose signature tune was Samuel Beckett Is Dead; in the Peter Harris Experience, which Peter hosted on Phonic FM from 2008, emulating his hero John Peel, or in one of many other forms.

From the early 1990s Peter lived in Great Torrington, a small Devon town he loved but regularly escaped from through the international activities of Wolf and Water, which eventually extended to Norway, India, Sweden, Iraq, Thailand, Zanzibar and elsewhere.

Early this year, Peter received his cancer diagnosis. He spent his final days quietly with friends in Braunton, north Devon, watching Doctor Who and playing Dungeons and Dragons.

He is survived by his cousin, Rick Glover.