| Peter Gill |
In Memory |
| Tributes from Actors, Critic, Playwright , Theatre of Wales & England , August 10, 2026 |
Attention is a key word in the latest studies of art, its making and its reception. It is a key word too in the tributes to Peter Gill. His first notable accomplishment was the disinterring of D H Lawrence as a dramatist. He took his cast to cottages in Eastwood, designer John Gunter with them. The depth of attention to detail made, said an actor, for unusually exacting rehearsals. Peter Gill was the transition for Luke Evans from musical theatre to be an actor in drama. Evans encountered a director such as he had never known. For the dialogue in “Small Change” Gill used a metronome to set the discipline of the speed of delivery of the lines he had written. Stephen Unwin used the same word: “Often staged with simplicity and brilliant clarity, his productions paid scrupulous attention to class, status and gender, while also bringing out the innate poetry of the piece – be it verbal, visual or theatrical – in the most luminous way imaginable. There was a rigorous classicism in his work, but the result was fresh, sensual and alive.” * * * * Unwin sketched the career: “Unlike many of his contemporaries, the working-class Gill never went to university. In his first job, he and his fellow Welshman, Anthony Hopkins, were ASMs on an Arts Council tour of Look Back in Anger and She Stoops to Conquer. “He then worked as an actor at the RSC, where he played Silvius to Vanessa Redgrave’s Rosalind in “As You Like It”, and was in Bill Gaskill’s production of “The Caucasian Chalk Circle, an experience he brilliantly anatomised in his book Apprenticeship. “Deciding to become a director, Peter cut his teeth at the Royal Court (or ‘the Court theatre’ as he always called it) in the 1960s, where he directed definitive productions of the three great plays of DH Lawrence, among many others. “In 1976, Peter became the first artistic director of the Riverside Studios, where he directed five remarkable productions of classical plays – by Shakespeare, Middleton and Chekhov – as well as hosting groundbreaking international seasons: he was the first to present the work of the Polish auteur director Tadeusz Kantor and gave house room to the band that became the Sex Pistols. It was a very special time, and for a few short years the Riverside was the most significant theatre in London.” “Peter joined the National Theatre as associate director in 1980, where he developed his own inimitable aesthetic, perhaps best described as an intensely poetic kind of figurative realism.” * * * * Unwin's judgement of Gill as a playwright: “Peter’s own plays that, to my mind, mark out his greatest contribution. Some are concerned with his own working-class upbringing in Cardiff: “Small Change” in 1976, “Kick for Touch” in 1983 and “Cardiff East” 14 years later. “Others are set against the background of historical events: 2002’s “Original Sin” and, in 2014, “Versailles.” Still others are meditations on being gay in the modern world: “Certain Young Men” and “The York Realist” on either side of the Millennium. “What links them is the quality of attention: these subtle, acutely observed studies of everyday life show men and women connected to each other by family, work and community, but who are also often strikingly alone. Especially in his signature productions, they’re quietly gripping and surprisingly stirring plays that have lasting appeal.” * * * * On the value for actors: “He showed me how to look and listen, not just study the text I was directing; how to notice what was unfolding in front of me, not what I had imagined in my head. I learned how class and status ran through the best drama and could be precisely embodied. I observed the way Peter would arrange figures in space, with each gesture and attitude imprinting itself on the retina like an Italian Renaissance painting. And I came to see that character emerges not just through what is said, but how it is said: in other words, that phrasing is fundamental. “Peter offered me, and others like me, something else too: an education in thinking. I had come up through the traditional Oxbridge route and he subjected me to a fair amount of joshing, especially for my (temporary) admiration for the European Konzepttheater: the irony, of course, was that Peter was extraordinarily well read and, for all his suspicion of the abstractions of the French and German theatre, was a true internationalist.” “Many of the things Peter stood for are out of fashion today. Above all, he was a proud anti-conceptual realist with an unflinching commitment to the text. But as a child of the 1960s he was au fait with all the fads of designer theatre and was no nostalgic conservative. “He could be contrary, sometimes infuriatingly so, but he was staggeringly well informed and all too often in the right. Peter’s legacy should, perhaps, remind us that a theatre that tells stories about human beings in all their complexity and contradiction is one that is most likely to resonate in the hearts and minds of its audience. He taught me more about directing – and playwriting – than anyone else." Abridged, with thanks and acknowledgement, from the full article which can be read at: https://www.stephenunwin.uk/thoughts-and-provocations/2026/8/4/peter-gill-1939-2026 * * * * Michael Billington also considered the dramatic legacy: He began with “Peter Gill, who has died aged 86, was one of the unsung heroes of British theatre. As both director and playwright his work was characterised by its uncompromising honesty and unflinching integrity. “...Gill’s work as a playwright and director were ultimately inseparable because they were linked by an unsparing honesty. In “Small Change” (1976), he recalled the unhealed emotional scars left by an adolescent sexual relationship. “In “Kick for Touch” (1983) he wrote with equal truth about a Welsh world of male bonding, rugby-as-religion and women as outsiders. “...If I had to seize on one play that shows Gill as both writer and director at his best it would be “The York Realist.” Its involves a farm labourer, George, who has an affair with a London-based director, John, while working on a production of the York Mystery Plays in the early 1960s. "It owes an obvious debt to D H Lawrence in its emotional intelligence, raw honesty and fascination with the intersection of class and sex. For John, the Yorkshire countryside has an exotic otherness of which he can never fully be a part while his lover, George, relishes the intellectual excitements of London but is wedded irrevocably to the land. It was as if much of what Gill had learned during his early years at the Court had been not just absorbed but miraculously enhanced.” Abridged, with thanks and acknowledgement, from the full article which can be read at: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2026/aug/04/peter-gill-playwright-director-the-york-realist-royal-court * * * * Playwright Barney Norris added a tribute and drew the contrast with Lawrence: “The framework hasn’t yet been created to talk about Peter’s significance...I went to interview his friend Bill Gaskill. What we talked about most that day was Wordsworth, and over the years I’ve come to see that as significant. It was Wordsworth who proposed that literature should speak in “the real language of men”. “That project flowered a century later in the work of DH Lawrence, who broke free of the conditions of his birth to revolutionise English literature. Lawrence tore through almost every barrier he encountered, for better or worse, in every aspect of his life – but he couldn’t break into the theatre. A “vertical invader” from a peasant class, to borrow John Berger’s description of Picasso, Lawrence reshaped the artistic landscape, but the English theatre made no room in his lifetime for the stories of working people. “It took another vertical invader to complete that revolution: a docker’s son from Cardiff who took Lawrence’s plays, placed them at the centre of the world and said, once and for all, “as much happens for you as for other people”. That was Peter’s achievement. He showed us anywhere could be the centre of the world. “And did so beautifully, in a Keatsian sense. When a stage direction required the baking of bread, Peter had his company bake bread, however long it took." Abridged, with thanks and acknowledgement, from the full article which can be read at: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2026/aug/05/peter-gill-theatre-audiences-dh-lawrence Peter Gill 7th September 1939-3rd August 2026 |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
This review has been read 132 times There are 39 other reviews of productions with this title in our database:
|
