Peter Gill (playwright)

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Peter Gill, director, dramatic author and former actor, was born in Cardiff, Wales, on 7 September 1939, son of George John Gill and his wife Margaret Mary (Browne).

He was educated at St Illtyd's College, Cardiff.

Contents

[edit] Career

An actor from 1957-1965, he directed his first production without décor, at the Royal Court Theatre in August 1965, A Collier's Friday Night by D. H. Lawrence. Having begun his career as an actor, he is now most renowned for his work as a director and playwright.

[edit] Royal Court

In 1964 be became Asssistant Director at the Royal Court and Associate Director in 1970, best known there as the director of three hitherto underrated plays by D. H. Lawrence, presented as a group in 1968. In 1969 the Royal Court also presented two of his own first plays, The Sleepers' Den and Over Garden Out, "which revealed that Gill could evoke with economy of means but with lyrical skill the circumstances of his Cardiff boyhood."[1]

[edit] Riverside Studios

Gill was appointed artistic director of the Riverside Studios in 1976, and on 30 May, 1976, his Nottingham/Edinburgh production of As You Like It (starring Jane Lapotaire as Rosalind, John Price as Orlando and Zoe Wanamaker as Celia, with a stage design by William Dudley) marked the official opening of the Hammersmith arts centre, formerly a film and television studio.

His first Riverside production was a staging of his own version of Chekov's The Cherry Orchard, which opened to universal press acclaim on 12 January 1978 (starring Judy Parfitt as Ranevskaya and Julie Covington as Varya, again with a setting designed by William Dudley).

Writing for The Sunday Times, theatre critic Bernard Levin said: "It is good to salute the opening of a new theatre; it is thrice good to be able to do so with almost unqualified praise for its first production. At the Riverside Studios, Peter Gill (who is in charge of the whole enterprise) has directed The Cherry Orchard with a cast so astonishingly suitable that I began, hallucinatorily, to believe that they had been assembled first, and that Chekhov had then written the play round them. What is more, they are achieving this effect on an impossible stage; it is seventy-five feet wide (the players have to sprint, never mind run, if they are to get off at all), absurdly shallow, and lacking even the most rudimentary trappings in the way of flies, a thrust or even wings....Mr Gill and his cast have sought success in the only place it can be found: inside themselves and the play. The effect is magical; The Cherry Orchard has almost never, in my experience, been at once so harrowing and so glittering; nor its fragile rhythms so finely, surely spun, its development so natural, human and real."[2]

When Gill left Riverside in 1980 to take up a post at the National Theatre, a West London theatre critic John Thaxter wrote: "It is no exaggeration to say that Gill's four years as director have taken Riverside to a leading position in British theatre; both with his own productions (notably The Cherry Orchard and this year's Julius Caesar) and as a generous host to world theatre giants: Tadeusz Kantor and Athol Fugard among them....It would also be fair to say that the major portion of the subsidies making all this possible came from the Hammersmith Council, which this year alone provided £200,000 to Riverside, although its audience is drawn from far and wide." [3]

[edit] National Theatre

As an associate director of the National Theatre 1980-1997, Gill also founded the National Theatre Studio in 1984, which he ran until 1 October 1990. In his own words: "When I set up the National Theatre Studio the development and analysis of acting was a central part of the work, so that, along with commissioning writers, developing directors and designers, investigating non-text based work, and producing work for the main house, the practice and analysis of acting skills seemed an essential part of any programme of work that was in part concerned with process."[4]

His involvement with the studio was ended by Richard Eyre, who noted in his diary at the time: "Peter's aesthetic is precise, fastidious, exclusive, which is his virtue as a director, but the Studio has to embrace talents that he disapproves of. I felt strongly how much I'd miss him, his drollery, his waspishness, his scorn, his occasional generosity, and his perceptive intelligence, often wrapped in almost impenetrable obliquities. And his apparently psychic ability to know about shows in detail (and criticise them) without having seen them."[5].

[edit] Plays

Plays include:

  • The Sleepers Den, 1965; Royal Court, November 1969
  • Over Gardens Out, Royal Court, November 1969
  • Small Change, National Theatre, February 1983
  • Kick for Touch, National Theatre, February 1983
  • In the Blue. National Theatre, November 1985
  • Mean Tears, National Theatre, July 1987
  • Cardiff East, National Theatre, February 1997
  • The Look Across the Eyes, published 1997
  • Certain Young Men, Almeida Theatre, January 1999
  • Friendly Fire, Crucible Youth Theatre, Sheffield, June 2002
  • Lovely Evening, Theatre 503, March 2005
  • The York Realist, Royal Court, 2002
  • Original Sin, Crucible Sheffield, 2002

Adaptations and versions:

[edit] Productions

[edit] Royal Court

  • A Collier's Friday Night (D. H. Lawrence), August 1965
  • The Local Stigmatic (Heathcote Williams), March 1966
  • The Ruffian on the Stair (Joe Orton), August 1966
  • A Provincial Life (Chekhov ad. Gill), October 1966
  • The Soldier's Fortune (Thomas Otway), January 1967
  • The Daughter-in-Law (D. H. Lawrence), March 1967. First prize at the Belgrade International Theatre Festival, 1968
  • The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (D. H. Lawrence), March 1968
  • Life Price (Michael O'Neill and Jeremy Seabrook), January 1969
  • The Sleepers' Den (Gill), November 1969
  • Over Gardens Out (Gill), November 1969
  • The Duchess of Malfi (John Webster), May 1972
  • Crete and Sergeant Pepper (John Antrobus), May 1972
  • The Merry-Go-Round (D. H. Lawrence ad. Gill), November 1973
  • The Fool (Edward Bond), November 1975
  • Small Change (Gill), July 1976
  • The York Realist (Gill), for English Touring Theatre, January 2002[1]

[edit] Riverside Studios

[edit] National Theatre

  • A Month in the Country (Turgenev), Olivier, February 1981
  • Don Juan (Moliere), Cottesloe, April 1981
  • Much Ado About Nothing, Olivier, August 1981
  • Danton's Death (Georg Büchner), Olivier, July 1982
  • Major Barbara (G B Shaw), Lyttelton, October 1982
  • Kick for Touch (Gill), Cottesloe, February 1983
  • Small Change (Gill), Cottesloe, February 1983
  • Tales from Hollywood (Christopher Hampton), Olivier, September 1983
  • Antigone (Sophocles), Cottesloe, October 1983
  • Venice Preserv'd (Thomas Otway), Lyttelton, April 1984
  • Fool for Love (Sam Shepard), Cottesloe, October 1984
  • As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner, ad. Peter Gill), Cottesloe, October 1985
  • Five Play Bill, Cottesloe, November 1985, including In the Blue (Gill)
  • Mean Tears (Gill), Cottesloe, July 1987
  • Mrs Klein (Nicholas Wright), Cottesloe, August 1988
  • Juno and the Paycock (Sean O'Casey), Lyttelton, February 1989
  • Cardiff East (Gill), February 1997
  • Luther (John Osborne), Olivier, October 2001
  • Scenes from the Big Picture (Owen McCafferty), Cottesloe, April 2003[2]
  • The Voysey Inheritance (Harley Granville-Barker), Lyttelton, April 2006 [3]

[edit] Other venues

[edit] Private life

Gill is gay.[6]

[edit] References

  • Who's Who in the Theatre, 17th Edition, Gale (1981) ISBN 0810302349
  • The National: The Theatre and its Work 1963-1997 by Simon Callow, Nick Hern Books (1997) ISBN 1854593234
  • At the Royal Court: 25 Years of the English Stage Company, ed. Richard Findlater, Amber Lane Press (1981) ISBN 090639922X
  • Actors Speaking with an introduction by Peter Gill, edited by Lyn Haill, Oberon Books (2007) ISBN 1840027761
  • Theatre Record and its annual Indexes
  1. ^ Entry by John Elsom in The Cambridge Guide to World Theatre, CUP (1988)
  2. ^ The true magic of Chekhov's World, Bernard Levin, The Sunday Times, 15 January, 1978
  3. ^ Peter Gill's swansong at Riverside, John Thaxter, Richmond and Twickenham Times, 31 October 1980
  4. ^ Introduction to Actors Speaking (2007)
  5. ^ National Service: Diary of a Decade by Richard Eyre, Bloomsbury (2003) ISBN 0747565899
  6. ^ The Independent, (July 2, 2006), Gay Power: The pink list. Retrieved June 25, 2007.

[edit] External links