The York Realist - Peter Gill

 Another playscript, this time by writer-director Peter Gill, perhaps best known for staging the plays of D H Lawrence in the Seventies.   The play, originally mounted in 2001 and revived inb 2018, is about a farm worker, George, who is put forward for and gets a part in an amateur production of the York Mystery plays.   He falls for the assistant director, John, who wants George to try turning professional, but George won't leave his mother and family and the farm.   So they continue a secret relationship for several years until John returns to attend Mother's funeral.

It is all expertly done.   The supporting characters are vividly drawn, as is the harsh reality of life on the lowest rung of the agricultural ladder.   The trap George finds himself in is evoked particularly in the character of his brother-in-law Arthur, who has escaped it.   The relationship between George and John is delicately done, but what makes the play stand out is Gill's technique for handling time and memory.   The audience - or in my case the reader - has to pay that bit of extra attention which inevitably makes engagement to a deeper level.

Gill uses the same technique in the two linked plays, The Look Across the Eyes and Lovely Evening, which accompany The York Realist in this 2018 edition.   These are set in Cardiff, where Gill was brought up, in the late Forties and early Fifties (Gill was born in 1939).   They focus on the household of May and Harry, before and after May's death.   In the first play their oldest son Laurence, who is also our narrator, is sixteen.   Laurence the narrator, though, is in his thirties; in both plays, therefore, he is looking back.   In The Look Across the Eyes, May's single brother Jimmy - a docker like Harry - is invited to move in.   He is still there, a permanent fixture with the widower Harry and the adult Laurence.   In Lovely Evening Laurence has taken on May;s household duties, looking after the two ageing brothers-in-law who go about their mysterious and separate evening activities.

So that's three slice-of-life working class dramas in a style I find increasingly appealing.   Gill is a very fine playwright and I'm keen to get hold of more of his published scripts.