I was, in Michael Coveney’s parlance, one of Peter Gill’s acolytes. I knew him in his autumn; after he’d directed his last play for the National, after he’d moved from Harriet Devine’s 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: “I introduced postmodernism to the theatre, darling.” I was proud he’d 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’d suggested the same thing to her. Now Peter has died, I have a strong feeling I should be writing about him again.
I think the framework hasn’t yet been created to talk about Peter’s significance. When I was researching my book about him, I went to interview his friend Bill Gaskill. What we talked about most that day was Wordsworth, and over the years I’ve come to see that as significant. It was Wordsworth who proposed that literature should speak in “the real language of men”. 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 – but he couldn’t break into the theatre. A “vertical invader” from a peasant class, to borrow John Berger’s 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’s son from Cardiff who took Lawrence’s plays, placed them at the centre of the world and said, once and for all, “as much happens for you as for other people”. That was Peter’s achievement. He showed us anywhere could be the centre of the world.
