Oliver Emanuel, who has died of brain cancer aged 43, was a playwright, teacher and radio playwright who produced some of the most creative productions of the last two decades.
Although his career was very short, it was still prolific and diverse. Among his 30-odd plays was the completely wordless Dragon (2013), which tells the story of a 12-year-old boy who hasn’t spoken since his mother’s death. Co-produced by Glasgow company Vox Motus, the National Theater of Scotland (NTS) and China’s Tianjin People’s Arts Theatre, the film featured a dazzling scene of Chinese dragons as a metaphor for the boy’s inner turmoil.
“When people ask me how I write a play without words, I always say, ‘Too slowly,'” Emanuel said with characteristic humor.
Directed by Candice Edmunds and Jamie Harrison, the play, which premiered at the Citizens Theater in Glasgow before going on tour, was nominated for the Scottish Theater Critics Awards (CATS) in four categories and won the award for Best Performance for Children and Young People. British Theater awards. In 2015, it was the first theater play aimed at family audiences at the Edinburgh international festival.
Equally groundbreaking was Vox Motus’s Flight (2017), about two refugees traveling from Kabul to London. Adapted by Emanuel from the Caroline Brothers’ novel Hinterland, the film required the audience to sit in a booth next to a rotating cylinder. Emanuel’s script was played over headphones while the story was told through a series of miniature tableaus passing in front. The show was staged again at the Bridge theater in London in 2021.
Born in Kent, Oliver was the son of English and drama teacher Mary (née Dunsmore) and barrister Peter Emanuel. He was eight before he learned to read and write, but in his youth he was encouraged by an English teacher at St Gregory’s Catholic school in Tunbridge Wells who chanced upon a love poem he had written.
Emanuel’s passion for literature was further strengthened in 1999 when he won first prize in the Guardian’s competition for young writers with an autobiographical story about a boy with synesthesia who worked at KFC. He began writing plays while studying English and drama at the University of Leeds and completed a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia.
She helped her family care for her mother through her 10-month bout with breast cancer until her death at the age of 50 in 2005. He was living at home at the time, and this experience inspired much of his work, most notably The Tenderness of Boys (2020). ) for BBC Radio 4, the play he considers his most personal.
But even before this he was drawn to the subject of pain. He founded the Silver Tongue theater with director Daniel Bye and made his professional debut in the slums of Edinburgh with Iz (2003), about three men mourning their former partners. With Bye, who remained his close friend, he staged plays such as Bella and the Beautiful Knight (2005), about two siblings coming to terms with their parents’ death, and Shiver (2006), about a flight attendant’s reunion with the pilot she believed in. to be dead.
These early writings led to his appointment as an adjunct writer at the West Yorkshire (now Leeds) Playhouse in 2006. Later in 2010 he became a guest writer for BBC Radio 4 Children in Need and was also an assistant playwright in London. He was writer-in-residence at Playwrights’ Studio, Scotland, and in 2019 at Gladstone’s Library, Flintshire. In 2013 he was appointed lecturer at the English school at the University of St Andrews, where he founded the MLitt in playwriting and screenwriting.
After moving to Glasgow in 2006, he became one of the important figures of Scottish theatre. His programs for younger audiences, often directed by Lu Kemp, include The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfishes (2013) for NTS and the CATS award-winning I Am Tiger (2022), which tackles the sensitive subject of an older brother. suicide.
NTS’s other plays included the trilogy The 306: Dawn, Day and Dusk (2016–18), part of the centenary commemorations of 14–18 Now, which looked at deserters, agitators and rebels whose stories are often excluded from history . from the first world war.
Among his many plays for BBC Radio 4 was the Tinniswood award-winning When the Pips Stop (2018). He was the lead author of Blood, Sex & Money (2015–16), an adaptation of Emile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart cycle and starring Glenda Jackson in her first role in 23 years in politics.
In April 2023, Emanuel suffered a seizure. He was diagnosed with stage four brain cancer and lost his ability to read. Still, he described his illness with a remarkable sense of humor on social media. “He was as brave in confronting his own death as he was in exploring death for adults and young people,” Harrison said. “He had a calm, philosophical approach to his own mortality.”
He was loved for his enthusiasm and inspiration as a teacher and mentor. “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 colleague, playwright and director Zinnie Harris.
A few weeks before his death, Emanuel married his long-time partner, theater producer Victoria Beesley. He is survived by his children Matilda and Isaac, along with his father and sister Alice.
• Oliver Robert Michael Emanuel, playwright, teacher and radio playwright, born April 4, 1980; Died December 19, 2023