by Oliver Emanuel was a playwright, teacher and radio dramatist, who died aged 43 from brain cancer, who put his name to some of the most imaginative productions of the last twenty years.
If his career was too short, it was still productive and varied. Among his 30 plays was the wordless Dragon (2013), in which he told the story of a 12-year-old boy who has not spoken since his mother’s death. Co-produced by the Glasgow company Vox Motus, the National Theater of Scotland (NTS) and the Tianjin People’s Art Theatre, China, it presented a fantastic sequence of Chinese dragons as a metaphor for the inner turmoil of the child.
“When people ask me how I write a play without words, I always say, ‘Very slowly,'” Emanuel said, with characteristic humor.
Directed by Candice Edmunds and Jamie Harrison, the play – which opened at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow before going on tour – was nominated in four categories for the Critics’ Awards for Theater in Scotland (CATS) and won best show for children and young people at the play. UK Theater Awards. In 2015 it was the first piece of theater for family audiences at the Edinburgh International Festival.
In the same way Flight (2017), as well as Vox Motus, was about two refugees traveling from Kabul to London. Adapted by Emanuel from the Caroline Brothers novel Hinterland, it required the audience to sit in a booth on the side of a rotating cylinder. The story was told in a series of miniature tables that went to the front, and Emanuel’s script was out on headphones. The show was staged again in 2021 at the Bridge theater in London.
Oliver was born in Kent, the son of Mary (née Dunsmore), an English and drama teacher, and Peter Emanuel, a solicitor. He was eight before he learned to read and write, but as a teenager he was inspired by an English teacher at St Gregory’s Catholic school in Tunbridge Wells, who accidentally came across a love poem he had written.
Emanuel’s literary ambitions were boosted when he won first prize in the Guardian’s competition for young writers in 1999 with an autobiographical story about a boy with synesthesia who worked at KFC. He began writing plays while studying English and theater at the University of Leeds, and went on to do 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 she died in 2005 aged 50. He was living at home at the time and the experience inspired much of his work, particularly The Tenderness of Boys (2020). ) for BBC Radio 4, which he considered the most personal drama.
Even before this, however, he was drawn to the subject of grief. Together with the director Daniel Bye, he founded the Silver Tongue theater and made his professional debut on the outskirts of Edinburgh with Iz (2003), about three men grieving their ex-partners. With Bye, who remained his 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. who reunited with the pilot she believed. be dead
These early plays led him to become writer-in-residence at Playhouse West Yorkshire (now Leeds) in 2006. He became writer-in-residence for BBC Radio 4 Children in Need in 2010, associate dramatist at Playwrights’ Studio, Scotland and writer-in-residence in Gladstone Library, Flintshire, in 2019. In 2013, he was appointed as a lecturer in the school of English at the University of St Andrews where he established the MLitt in drama and screenwriting.
After moving to Glasgow in 2006, he became a central figure in Scottish theatre. His shows for younger audiences, often directed by Lu Kemp, include The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish (2013) for NTS and CATS’ award-winning I Am Tiger (2022), which tackled sensitive matter older brothers. suicide.
Other dramas for the NTS included a trilogy, The 306: Dawn, Day and Dusk (2016–18), part of the 14–18 Now centenary, which looked at the deserters, raiders and rebels left behind some stories are usually omitted from history. of the first world war.
Among his many plays for BBC Radio 4 was When the Pips Stop (2018) which won the Tinniswood award. He was the 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. However, he registered his illness with great good humor on social media. “He was as courageous in facing his own death as he was in exploring death for adults and young people,” Harrison said. “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 St. Andrew’s colleague Zinnie Harris. , the playwright and director.
Emanuel married his long-term partner, Victoria Beesley, a theater actress, a few weeks before his death. She survives him with their children, Matilda and Isaac, his father and sister Alice.
• Oliver Robert Michael Emanuel, playwright, teacher and radio dramatist, born 4 April 1980; he died 19 December 2023
