Peter Gill

Peter Gill OBE (born 7 September 1939) is a Welsh theatre director, playwright, and actor. He was born in Cardiff to George John and Margaret Mary (née Browne) Gill, and educated at St Illtyd's College, Cardiff.

An actor from 1957–65, 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.

In 1964, he became Assistant Director at the Royal Court and Associate Director in 1970, best known there as the director of three hitherto under-rated 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 Gardens Out, "which revealed that Gill could evoke with the economy of means and lyrical skill the circumstances of his Cardiff boyhood."

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 Zoë Wanamaker as Celia, with a stage design by William Dudley) marked the official opening of the Hammersmith arts centre, formerly television studios. His first Riverside production was a staging of his own version of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, which opened to press acclaim on 12 January, 1978 (starring Judy Parfitt as Ranevskaya and Julie Covington as Varya, again with a setting designed by William Dudley).[citation needed ]

Writing for The Sunday Times, theatre critic Bernard Levin said:

When Gill left Riverside in 1980 to be an Associate Director at the National Theatre, a West London theatre critic John Thaxter wrote:

As an Associate Director of the National Theatre from 1980 to 1997, Gill also founded the National Theatre Studio in 1984, which he ran until 1 October, 1990. In his own words:

Plays include:

Adaptations and versions:

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 diaries of Joe Orton, for whom he directed a double bill of former television plays by Orton at the Royal Court called Crimes of Passion. [citation needed ]

In 2007, the British Library acquired Peter Gill's papers and supplementary papers consisting of literary works, theatre administration and correspondence. National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C1316/08) with Peter Gill in 2008-2009 for its The Legacy of the English Stage Company collection held by the British Library.