Now that Cardiffian Peter Gill is no more, following his death in August, it is possible to come to measured conclusions about his achievements. And there can be no doubt that posterity will rank him among Wales’ greatest playwrights, in the company of people of the calibre of Twm o’r Nant (1738-1810), Saunders Lewis (1893-1985), John Gwilym Jones (1904-1988), Emlyn Williams (1905-1987), WS Jones (1920-2007), Gwenlyn Parry (1932-1991) and Mike Pearson (1950-2022). A man who had theatre coursing through his veins, he not only wrote a string of startlingly original and realistic plays but also directed them himself as well as directing many works written by the cream of history’s dramatists.

In the last few weeks I’ve been asking a cross-section of friends, acquaintances, neighbours and random encounters what they thought of Peter Gill. Although in no way a scientific survey, it was nevertheless a pretty thorough vox pop covering a wide variety of backgrounds, ages and outlooks – and it is symptomatic of the decultured and degraded state of the capital of Wales that not a single person I asked had ever heard of him. It is their loss, but it also is a sad reflection of the collapse of knowledge and ideas that has happened over the last 20 years as people have rapidly transformed into atomised and hyper-individualised ignorant zombies scrolling uselessly on their phones. Like all people of decency and intelligence, Peter Gill despaired at the what has been done to society.

He was born in Cardiff, one of four children of George Gill, a docker, and his wife Margaret (nee Browne), and grew up in the newly-built Tremorfa housing estate. Naturally intelligent, he was educated at the Catholic St Illtyd’s Grammar School, then located in Courtney Road, Splott (it relocated to Llanrumney in 1964). As a young gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal as well as taboo, he couldn’t get out of uptight, conservative Cardiff fast enough. He didn’t bother with further education and instead went straight to London to take his chances in the Big City. With his seriousness and intensity, he had somehow charmed his way into acting by 1957 and learnt on the job in films and TV as well as the stage. In film, he had small parts in HMS Defiant (1962), As You Like It (1963) and Zulu (1964); in TV he appeared in Saturday Playhouse (1960), A Matter of Degree (1960), The Citadel (1960), City Beneath the Sea (1962), Suspense (1963), Detective (1964), No Hiding Place (1964) and Danger Man (1965); and in theatre he had a short stint playing walk-on parts with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) when it had its first season at the London’s Aldwych Theatre in 1961 and then a minor role in Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle in 1962.

It was his association with the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square that properly launched Gill’s theatrical career. Deeply influenced by the Royal Court’s stringent and perfectionist gay director William Gaskill (1930-2016), he was made an assistant director in 1965 and immediately given directorial responsibilities. His fierce intelligence, meticulous methods and wealth of ideas meant his very first play, The Sleepers Den, written and directed by him, was staged at the Royal Court that year. A haunting portrait of working-class Welsh life set in Cardiff, it explored themes of family, mental illness and poverty that would be abiding Gill leitmotivs. In a series of increasingly claustrophobic scenes, the play went where few others had hitherto gone, probing the psychological toll of caring for ageing parents and how financial hardship weakens family bonds. Only 26, Gill unapologetically flagged up his radical Welsh socialist colours in the middle of posh South Kensington and asked a disturbing and profound question: in a society that does nothing for those most in need, is madness the only sane response to an insane world?

Peter Gill had arrived as a theatrical force – and he never looked back. In quick succession he adapted an Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) short story for the stage, he collaborated with Joe Orton (1933-1967) on a double bill of his plays in the year he was murdered, he directed The Soldier’s Fortune by Thomas Otway (1652-1685), and he made a huge impact by directing a trilogy of three virtually unknown neglected plays by DH Lawrence (1885-1930) – uncovering Lawrence’s vivid working-class realism in a Nottingham mining community, the poetry, pain, customs, warmth and courage. The washing of a miner’s corpse in five-minutes of silence was an indelible scene that cemented Gill’s reputation as a theatrical maestro.

He was promoted to an Associate Director of the Royal Court in 1970 and kept on delivering acclaimed productions with his signature unimpeachable good taste, deeply felt emotion and lucid explorations of the human condition: his second play, the brilliant Cardiff-set Over Gardens Out, following the texture and rhythms of ordinary life in the burgeoning relationship of two confused teenage boys on the cusp of adulthood; a marvellous version of the John Webster (c1578-c1632) classic The Duchess of Malfi; a profoundly moving production of The Fool, about the poet John Clare (1793-1864), by Edward Bond (1934-2024); important works by three playwrights he admired, Heathcote Williams (1941-2017), John Antrobus (1933-2025) and Jeremy Seabrook (1939-2024); and his own third play in 1976, the simultaneously complex and simple masterpiece Small Change, a richly poignant experience, again set in Cardiff, with just four actors playing two boyhood friends meeting again later in life and their mothers – each fighting a losing battle against their material circumstances.

After all these ground-breaking productions in a decade at the Royal Court, Gill felt it was time for a change and to that end he became the founding director of the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, creating an arts centre and a theatrical jewel on the banks of the Thames. There he directed five unforgettable incarnations from the classical and contemporary repertoire: Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, The Changeling by Jacobean playwrights Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) and William Rowley (c1585-1626), Scrape off the Black by then 25-year-old Cornish-Nigerian Tunde Ikoli, and two from the quill pen of William Shakespeare (c1564-1616) – Measure for Measure and Julius Caesar.

In 1980 he was lured to the (English/British) National Theatre (NT) further east on the Thames at South Bank to run both his own hand-picked company and the experimental NT Studio. There he really began to attain revered status for his always exciting, unpredictable and innovative directorial skills, displayed in productions of A Month in the Country by Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883), the Bard’s Much Ado About Nothing, Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Tales from Hollywood by Christopher Hampton, Venice Preserv’d by Otway, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1897-1962), the riveting Mrs Klein by his old Royal Court colleague Nicholas Wright, and his own Kick for Touch, an explosive, lyrical and beautifully unadorned sequel to Small Change.

He was now in demand and could pick and choose his work. He directed in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the USA as his international standing grew. For the RSC he directed a dazzling Twelfth Night at both Stratford-upon-Avon and the Aldwych, American playwright Richard Nelson’s New England and A Patriot for Me by John Osborne (1929-1994), while his parallel career writing and directing his own plays became more and more important. Cardiff was often the setting for his most potent works and became his subject matter in Cardiff East, a coruscating portrait of a community the Tories tried to annihilate and New Labour tried to forget, which premiered at the NT’s Cottesloe Theatre in 1997. The sensitive, gay, Catholic lad from Tremorfa shoved the post-industrial agonies of his home town down the privileged craws of la-di-da London theatre-goers, pin-pointed Cardiff on the map and asked questions that no other playwright had even considered. What are ‘family values’? What does it feel like to be a stranger in your own country? Why don’t the Welsh reach for the Armalite rifle? – questions that remain urgent and unanswered to this day. Other profound and daring plays, often set in Wales, that Gill wrote and directed through the 1980s and 1990s into the 21st century include In the Blue, Mean Tears, Certain Young Men, Another Door Closed, The Look Across The Eyes, Friendly Fire, Lovely Evening and The York Realist. In so doing, he asserted some still radical truths: all human life isn’t found somewhere else – it’s in your own square mile; and crucial experiences don’t occur in flashy, implausible melodramas – but in the small details of mundane domesticity.

Gill directed countless productions by just about every notable playwright, living or dead. There simply isn’t the space to catalogue them all here, suffice to say he had directed nearly 100 plays by the time he was ready to retire from the fray. Settled in Hammersmith, he’d more than done his bit and was beginning to feel marginalised in the dumbed-down internet world of tiny attention spans, shallow posturing and regurgitated tropes. He had two fantastic last hurrahs as writer/director: Versailles in 2014 at the Donmar Warehouse in London, a stunning and very topical lament triggered by the anniversary of the outbreak of WW1; and Something in the Air in 2022 at the Jermyn Street Theatre in London, an authentic tear-jerker about two old gay men in a care home, holding hands as they reminisced about past lovers.

Although a Londoner to his bone-marrow, he was always passionately Welsh and never really left Cardiff. He completed a circle in 2012 when he directed in Cardiff for the first time, a masterful production of Chekhov’s A Provincial Life for National Theatre Wales (closed in 2024) at Sherman Cymru. The prodigal son had come home a hero.