Peter Gill, playwright who turned ordinary lives into extraordinary drama, dies aged 86

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 Theatre

Tributes 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.

Uncertain of his strengths as an actor, however, he moved into directing. He was encouraged by the Royal Court’s artistic director George Devine who took him on as an assistant director. He would go on to stage as many as 100 productions.

The first, in 1965, was A Collier’s Friday Night by DH Lawrence, a writer whom he championed in the following years. He revived the play in 1968 as part of a trilogy of Laurence’s neglected mining plays, adding The Daughter-in-Law and The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd. He also staged The Merry-Go-Round in 1973.

In 1976, he became the first artistic director of Riverside Studios in Hammersmith in London, where he staged The Cherry Orchard, with Eleanor Bron, Julie Covington and Michael Elphick, and The Changeling, with Brian Cox and Robert Lindsay. He also established an eye-catching programme of international work. Central to his operation was the Riverside theatre studio, a series of actors’ workshops designed to foster a company spirit.

In 1980, he became associate director at the National Theatre, where, in 1984, he set up the National Theatre Studio to give playwrights and directors space to develop ideas. He remained with the National until 1997.

His many productions for the company included Christopher Hampton’s Tales from Hollywood, with Michael Gambon, Billie Whitelaw and Ian McDiarmid; Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserv’d, with Ian McKellen, Michael Pennington and Jane Lapotaire; and Harley Granville-Barker’s The Voysey Inheritance, with Dominic West and Julian Glover. Elsewhere, he staged plays by Chekhov, Pinter, Orton, Shaw, Mamet and Hare.

His work as a playwright was no less impressive. His first play, The Sleepers Den, about a family falling apart in a claustrophobic Cardiff slum, was produced in 1965 and starred Eileen Atkins. He returned repeatedly to the working-class Catholic Wales of his childhood, drawing out the extraordinary in ordinary lives and frequently focusing on male relationships, gay or otherwise.

Subsequent work included Over Gardens Out, about two teenage tearaways, and Small Change, a coming-of-age tale about two Cardiff boys, which he staged three times over his career. In the Blue, an expressionist play about two gay men, was written in such a way as to make it impossible to know what was real and what was fantasy.

In Sheffield in 2002, Grandage devoted a month-long season to Gill’s plays. It included the premiere of Original Sin, about an upwardly mobile Victorian street boy, and a revival of Small Change. Also revived were Kick for Touch, about two brothers, one of whom has had an affair with the other’s wife, Mean Tears, a romantic drama set in the greed-is-good 1980s, and Friendly Fire, aimed at teenagers.

The York Realist, staged by English Touring theatre in 2002 before a run in the West End, considered the class system through the lens of an affair between a Yorkshire farmer and a London theatre director. Guardian critic Michael Billington rated it among the best plays of the 21st century. His other later plays included Versailles, As Good a Time as Any and Something in the Air.

Gill was appointed OBE in 1980 and reflected on a life of theatre-making in his book Apprenticeship in 2008.

Kenyon said that Gill “loved actors and acting” and added: “Whenever we talked, I walked away a wiser person … He was a singular man, a kind, generous and curious man. I will miss him greatly.”

Tamara Harvey, co-artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, said that Gill’s “unerring ability to capture the complexity of human existence will live on in his writing but he will, nevertheless, be deeply missed”.

Gill is survived by his nieces and nephews. He was predeceased by his brothers Bernard and Paul, and his sister Mary.