Peter Gill, playwright and director, dies aged 86

Gill’s dramas of divided class loyalties such as The York Realist had a clear-eyed precision matched by his rigorous work as a directorPeter Gill, playwright who turned ordinary lives into extraordinary drama, dies aged 86Peter 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. Much admired by his fellow artists, he at last achieved a degree of public fame in his annus mirabilis of 2002 when his terrific play The York Realist won a number of awards and the Sheffield Crucible staged a month-long retrospective of his work as well as a brand-new play, Original Sin.Few remember that Gill, born into a Welsh, working class Catholic family, began life as an actor: look closely and you can spot him in the film of Zulu. But it was at London’s Royal Court, where he began work as an associate director in 1964, that he learned his craft and acquired the values that were to shape his whole career: a belief in the sanctity of text, the purity of design and a respect for actors. Continue reading...

Acclaimed playwright and director whose reputation was forged at the Royal Court theatre in LondonPeter Gill, who has died aged 86, was a rarity in British theatre in being an accomplished director of his own plays; he wrote them, you felt, mainly so that he could also direct them and thus maintain the vision and the poetry of his writing in their physical manifestation.His reputation as a meticulous realist with unimpeachable good taste in casting was forged at the Royal Court in London where, in 1968, he made his name overnight by directing a trilogy of virtually unknown plays by DH Lawrence. For the first time, said Christopher Hampton, the novelist was revealed as “one of the alarmingly few really interesting early 20th-century stage writers”. Continue reading...

Beginning his career as an actor, Gill went on to write plays including The York Realist as well as directing for the Royal Court and National TheatreTributes have been paid to the director and playwright Peter Gill who died on Monday at the age of 86. His agent Mel Kenyon said Gill’s work had a “rare emotional delicacy” and was “beautifully observed and finely tuned” while the director Michael Grandage said Gill’s “contribution to the British theatre will come to be regarded as quietly seismic”.Gill began his career as an actor at London’s Royal Court in 1958 when still in his teens. Over the next six years, he played Silvius opposite Vanessa Redgrave as Rosalind in Michael Elliott’s lauded RSC production of As You Like It, as well as several roles in the British premiere of Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Continue reading...