Oliver Emanuel, who has died aged 43 from brain cancer, was a playwright, teacher and radio dramatist who put his name to some of the most imaginative productions of the last two decades.
If his career was too short, it was still productive and varied. Among his 30-odd plays was the entirely wordless Dragon (2013), in which he told the story of a 12-year-old boy who has not spoken since the death of his mother. Co-produced by the Glasgow company Vox Motus, the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) and the Tianjin People’s Art Theatre, China, it fielded a dazzling sequence of Chinese dragons as a metaphor for the child’s inner turmoil.
“When people ask me how I wrote a play with no words, I always say, ‘Very slowly,’” Emanuel said, with characteristic humour.
Directed by Candice Edmunds and Jamie Harrison, the play – which opened at the Citizens theatre, Glasgow before touring – was nominated in four categories for the Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland (CATS) and won best show for children and young people at the UK Theatre awards. In 2015 it became the first piece of theatre for family audiences at the Edinburgh international festival.
Equally groundbreaking was Flight (2017), also by Vox Motus, about two refugees journeying from Kabul to London. Adapted by Emanuel from Caroline Brothers’ novel Hinterland, it required the viewer to sit in a booth at the side of a rotating cylinder. The story was told in a series of miniature tableaux that passed in front, while Emanuel’s script played out on headphones. The show was staged again in 2021 at the Bridge theatre in London.
Born in Kent, Oliver was the son of Mary (nee Dunsmore), an English and drama teacher, and Peter Emanuel, a solicitor. He was eight before he learned to read and write, but in his teens was encouraged by an English teacher at St Gregory’s Catholic school in Tunbridge Wells who had accidentally come across a love poem he had written.
Emanuel’s literary ambitions were bolstered when he won first prize in a Guardian competition for young writers in 1999 with an autobiographical story about a boy with synaesthesia who worked at KFC. He began writing plays while studying English and theatre at the University of Leeds, and went on to take an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia.
He helped his family care for his mother through 10 months of breast cancer before her death in 2005 at the age of 50. He had been living at home at the time and the experience inspired much of his work, notably The Tenderness of Boys (2020) for BBC Radio 4, the play he considered his most personal.
Even before this, however, he was drawn to the subject of grief. With the director Daniel Bye, he set up Silver Tongue theatre and made his professional debut on the Edinburgh fringe with Iz (2003), about three men grieving for their former partner. With Bye, who remained a close friend, he staged plays including Bella and the Beautiful Knight (2005), about two siblings processing the death of their parents, and Shiver (2006), about a flight attendant reunited with the pilot she had believed to be dead.
These early pieces led to his being taken on as a writer-on-attachment at the West Yorkshire (now Leeds) Playhouse in 2006. He later became writer-in-residence for BBC Radio 4 Children in Need in 2010, an associate playwright at Playwrights’ Studio, Scotland and writer-in-residence at Gladstone’s Library, Flintshire, in 2019. In 2013, he was appointed a lecturer in the school of English at the University of St Andrews where he founded the MLitt in playwriting and screenwriting.
After moving to Glasgow in 2006, he became a key figure in Scottish theatre. His shows for younger audiences, often directed by Lu Kemp, included The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish (2013) for the NTS and the CATS award-winning I Am Tiger (2022), which tackled the sensitive subject of an older brother’s suicide.
Other plays for the NTS included a trilogy, The 306: Dawn, Day and Dusk (2016–18), part of the 14–18 Now centenary commemorations, which looked at the deserters, agitators and rebels whose stories are usually omitted from the history of the first world war.
His many plays for BBC Radio 4 included the Tinniswood award-winning When the Pips Stop (2018). He was a lead writer on Emile Zola’s Blood, Sex & Money (2015–16), an adaptation of the novelist’s Les Rougon-Macquart cycle, starring Glenda Jackson in her first role after 23 years in politics.
In April 2023, Emanuel had a seizure. He was diagnosed with grade four brain cancer and lost the ability to read. Nonetheless, he charted his illness with remarkable good humour on social media. “He was as courageous in facing his own death as he was in exploring death for adults and young people,” said Harrison. “He had this calm, philosophical approach to his own mortality.”
As a teacher and mentor, he was loved for his enthusiasm and inspiration. “He was always thinking about how the industry could work better, how we could support each other more and find new ways to teach the craft,” said his St Andrew’s colleague Zinnie Harris, the playwright and director.
Emanuel married his long-term partner, Victoria Beesley, a theatremaker, a few weeks before his death. She survives him along with their children, Matilda and Isaac, his father and a sister Alice.
• Oliver Robert Michael Emanuel, playwright, teacher and radio dramatist, born 4 April 1980; died 19 December 2023
