Peter Gill: a theatrical visionary with an unsparing honesty<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n I was, in Michael Coveney\u2019s parlance<\/a>, one of Peter Gill\u2019s acolytes. I knew him in his autumn; after he\u2019d directed his last play for the National, after he\u2019d moved from Harriet Devine\u2019s house in Hammersmith, where he lived for most of his adult life, into his flat a little further down the river. For 20 years we met there, or in the community centre when we held workshops with actors to help him develop material. One day he told me I should write a book about him: \u201cI introduced postmodernism to the theatre, darling.\u201d I was proud he\u2019d asked me, a feeling that only slightly receded when I read an article by Nina Raine a few years later, in which she revealed he\u2019d suggested the same thing to her. Now Peter has died, I have a strong feeling I should be writing about him again.<\/p>\n I think the framework hasn\u2019t yet been created to talk about Peter\u2019s significance. When I was researching my book about him<\/a>, I went to interview his friend Bill Gaskill<\/a>. What we talked about most that day was Wordsworth, and over the years I\u2019ve come to see that as significant. It was Wordsworth who proposed that literature should speak in \u201cthe real language of men\u201d. That project flowered a century later in the work of DH Lawrence, who broke free of the conditions of his birth to revolutionise English literature. Lawrence tore through almost every barrier he encountered, for better or worse, in every aspect of his life \u2013 but he couldn\u2019t break into the theatre. A \u201cvertical invader\u201d from a peasant class, to borrow John Berger\u2019s description of Picasso, Lawrence reshaped the artistic landscape, but the English theatre made no room in his lifetime for the stories of working people. It took another vertical invader to complete that revolution: a docker\u2019s son from Cardiff who took Lawrence\u2019s plays, placed them at the centre of the world and said, once and for all, \u201cas much happens for you as for other people\u201d. That was Peter\u2019s achievement. He showed us anywhere could be the centre of the world.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/d4a06a322256205323402cfc998797ddf28cc390\/241_0_1639_1312\/master\/1639.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=d67558d63b5a47f566b376013f5a5772\" "\\"Peter")
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