Back

 Previous

Next

Peter Gill
Peter Gill, theatre director, playwright 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.

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 best known for his work as a director and playwright.

Royal Court
In 1964 be became Assistant 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 and lyrical skill the circumstances of his Cardiff boyhood."

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."

When Gill left Riverside in 1980 to be an Associate Director 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."

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."

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.".

Plays
Plays include:

• The Sleepers Den, 1965; Royal Court, November 1969
• Over Gardens Out, Royal Court, November 1969
• Small Change, Royal Court, February 1976
• 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:

• A Provincial Life (Chekhov), Royal Court, 1966
• The Merry-Go-Round (D. H. Lawrence), Royal Court, 1973
• The Cherry Orchard (Chekhov), Riverside Studios, 1978
• Touch and Go (D. H. Lawrence), Riverside Studios, 1980
• As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner), National Theatre, 1985
• The Seagull (Chekhov), RSC, Swan Stratford and Aldwych Theatre, 2000

Productions:
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

Riverside Studios

• As You Like It, Nottingham and Edinburgh production: opening production at Riverside Studios, 30 May 1976
• The Cherry Orchard (Chekov, ad. Gill), January 1978
• The Changeling (Thomas Middleton and William Rowley), September 1978
• Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), May 1979
• Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), May 1980
• Scrape Off the Black (Tunde Ikoli), July 1980
• Touch and Go (D. H. Lawrence), rehearsed reading October 1980, to mark the 50th anniversary of the author's death

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
• The Voysey Inheritance (Harley Granville-Barker), Lyttelton, April 2006

Other venues

• O'Flaherty V.C. (Bernard Shaw), Mermaid Theatre, September 1966
• Crimes of Passion and June Evening (tour), 1967
• Life Price and Much Ado About Nothing, Stratford, Connecticut, 1969
• Landscape and Silence (Harold Pinter), Lincoln Center's Forum Theater, 1970
• Hedda Gabler (Ibsen), Stratford, Connecticut, 1970
• Cato Street, Young Vic,1971
• Crete and Sergeant Pepper and Midsummer Night's Dream, Zurich, 1972
• The Daughter-in-Law, Bochum, 1972
• Twelfth Night, RSC Stratford. August 1974, Aldwych Theatre, February 1975
• As You Like It, Nottingham Playhouse, Edinburgh Festival 1975; and the opening of Riverside Studios, 30 May 1976
• The Way of the World (Congreve), Lyric Hammersmith, October 1992
• New England (Richard Nelson), RSC The Pit, November 1994
• Uncle Vanya (Chekhov) for Field Day, Tricycle Theatre, April 1995
• A Patriot for Me (John Osborne), RSC Barbican Theatre, October 1995
• Tongue of a Bird (Ellen McLaughlin), Almeida Theatre, November 1997
• Certain Young Men (Gill), Almeida Theatre. January 1999
• The Seagull (Chekhov ad. Gill), RSC Swan Theatre, Stratford, February 2000; Barbican Theatre, April 2000
• Speed-the-Plow (David Mamet), New Ambassadors Theatre, March 2000; Duke of York's Theatre, June 2000
• The York Realist (Gill) for English Touring Theatre at the Royal Court, January 2002; Strand Theatre, March 2002
• Original Sin (Gill), Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, June 2002
• Days of Wine and Roses (J P Miller adap.Owen McCafferty), Donmar Warehouse, February 2005
• Epitaph for George Dillon (John Osborne and Anthony Creighton), Comedy Theatre, September 2005
• Gaslight (Patrick Hamilton), Old Vic, June 2007

Private life
Gill is openly gay. He lived from the 1960s until 2006 in a small flat in the Thameside house formerly belonging to George Devine and later bought by playwright Donald Howarth and his civil partner George Goetschuis. Gill gets several mentions in the diary of Joe Orton, for whom he directed a double bill of former television plays by Orton at the Royal Court called 'Crimes of Passion'. Orton visted him at home 11 April 1966 when he says Gill made him a curious lunch out of a tin and he also met Donald Howarth.