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Peter
Gill by Christopher Hampton
(from the programme of the July 1976
Royal Court Theatre first performance of Small Change by
Peter Gill)
When I worked for a brief and, in retrospect, ludicrous spell in the Literary
Department (Dramaturgie) of a huge German theatre, the Hamburg Schauspielhaus,
one of my tasks, alongside of writing reports in execrable German on the
complete plays of Swinburne, was to draw to the attention of my colleagues
supposing I should happen to encounter one of them, wandering disconsolately
through featureless corridors in the bowels of the budding, plays newly produced
in London which I thought might be of interest to them. The name of D.H.Lawrence
excited a great deal of advance interest, but I knew when I distributed copies
of the text of The
Daughter-in-Law, its impenetrable dialect printed in miniscule
greenish typescript in a Royal Court programme (price 1/-) that its acceptance
could hardly be immediate. After all, the play had been sitting around England
for 50 odd years, waiting for someone to comprehend its potential, realise its
atmosphere and add Lawrence to the alarmingly short list of really interesting
early twentieth century British dramatists.
The production of the Lawrence
Trilogy, with its meticulous attention to detail, unforgettable images and
emotional truthfulness was one of the landmarks of my theatre going life, and
its influence on a whole line of work in the theatre and on television was far
reaching. What's more, all this was widely recognised at the time. What has not
been nearly as fully acknowledged, it seems to me, is the quality and range of
Peter Gill's subsequent work in the theatre. For example and at random:
Ruffian on the Stair,
the first production I had seen of an Orton play, which successfully
accommodated the peculiar glittering solemnity of his style; Peter Gill's own
plays, The Sleepers' Den
and Over Gardens Out,
which apart from being beautifully observed and acted with musical precision,
made the most resourceful use I have ever seen of the Theatre Upstairs' space;
Life Price by Jeremy
Seabrook and Michael O'Neill which found a style of slightly heightened, bleak,
but not cheerless naturalism, and incidently proved the official view that
people would not come to the theatre if the seats were free and would not enjoy
it if they did to be nonsense;
Twelfth Night with the Royal Shakespeare Company, which was quite
simply the best Shakespeare production I had seen in years, tender and
melancholy without being in the least sentimental, and harsh and clean, without
being in the least austere, the sexual ambiguities defined in a way that was
neither evasive nor crude; and most recently, Edward Bond's
The Fool, a production of
exemplary severity, economy and clarity, which (like the play) was mysteriously
under-rated.
A dislike of ostentation and a refusal to over simplify are not of course
virtues which commend themselves to English critics: but there are other
qualities in Peter Gill's work which are not so easily ignored. These include a
powerful sense of imagery, which, even when one quarrels with the interpretation
of a play (as I did in the case of
The Duchess of Malfi at the Royal Court) is memorably imposing;
a shrewd appreciation of the possibilities of individual stages (the only
occasion I worked with Peter was a translator of
Hedda Gabler, which he
directed at the Shakespeare Festival Theatre, Ontario, on a stage which is
comically inappropriate for the play, but which he managed to use more fully and
imaginatively than many a Shakespeare production had, despite its intransigent
shape); and a talent for finding and developing young actors and actresses and
coaxing remarkable performances out of them. Above all, both as writer and
director, he has an unerring eye for illuminating detail: and no one has a surer
grasp of the strangeness of reality.
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