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Oliver Emanuel - An Obituary

Oliver Emanuel – Playwright   Born April 4 th 1980; died December 19th 2023      Oliver Emanuel, who has died aged 43, was a playwright whose every work was an adventure. This wasn’t just the way Emanuel sometimes filled his plays with fantastical creatures. It was how he brought his writing to dramatic life, driven by a sense of wonder and compassion. Whether it was writing a play without actors, as with Flight (2017-2020), or penning a piece without words with Dragon (2013-2015), Emanuel relished the challenge of finding new forms in expansive and playful ways.   He did this both on stage and on radio, where his imagination flew, using the medium as a creative tool. This was used to maximum effect in When the Pips Stop (2019), written for the centenary of the BBC. Emanuel took the idea of the state broadcaster going off air in the event of a nuclear attack and ran with it, to the extent of the play not only interrupting The Archers, but not being listed, advertised or trailed in any

Norman Lear - An Obituary

Norman Lear – Television producer, screenwriter Born July 27, 1922; died December 5 2023      Norman Lear, who has died aged 101, was a writer and television producer, whose sitcoms broke taboos to depict warts and all portrayals of working class lives. He did this most notably with All in the Family (1971-1979), in which blue collar New Yorker Archie Bunker offloaded his assorted prejudices onto his infinitely more enlightened family.   Based on Johnny Speight’s British sitcom, Till Death Us Do Part (1965-1975), All in the Family broke more than one mould. Thematically, its depiction of previously no-go areas for TV comedy such as racism, feminism, homosexuality, religion, and the Vietnam War was a daring intervention into the mainstream. Secondly, it was one of the first sit-coms to ditch pre-recorded laughter tracks, with the show taped in front of a live audience.    This combination saw Lear’s creation become regarded as one of the greatest American TV shows of all time. Its portr

Chris Parr - An Obituary

Chris Parr – Theatre and television producer and director   Born 25 September 1943; died 24 November 2023   Chris Parr, who has died aged 80, was a producer and director, who led Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre during a crucial time in the new writing theatre’s history, before carving out a successful career as a TV producer. With little interest in the London or international theatre scenes, Parr was, according to Joyce McMillan in her book, The Traverse Theatre Story (1988), the nearest thing the Traverse had to a working class director.   Parr’s career, McMillan said, was ‘marked by a cultural antipathy to the British establishment, and its metropolitan values’. What this meant in real terms was opening the door on an already vocal wave of Scottish writers who spoke directly in their own voice. Both Tom McGrath’s play, The Hardman (1977), written by McGrath with convicted murderer Jimmy Boyle, and The Slab Boys (1978), by John Byrne, were produced during Parr’s tenure.   Parr retained

John Byrne - An obituary

  John Byrne – 6 January 1940 - 30 November 2023  “I was brought up in Ferguslie Park,” painter, playwright and all round polymath John Byrne told Scottish Art News in 2014 of the Paisley housing estate he grew up in. “And I remember thanking God when we moved there, because I knew then that I had all the things I needed for whatever it was that I wanted to do.”   Ferguslie Park was never far away in everything that followed, right up  to Byrne’s death aged 83 following a long and maverick career that saw him renowned as an artist of vigorous imagination, be it as a painter, playwright or stage set designer.    As the 2022 retrospective at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum –  John Byrne: A Big Adventure  - showed, Byrne’s output was a vast and deeply personal affair. The exhibition was also recognition for an artist whose first experience of Kelvingrove came as a child, when he saw works by Titian and Salvador Dali's ‘Christ of Saint John of the Cross’ for the first time. Byrne’s

Phillip A. Bruno - An Obituary

Phillip A. Bruno January 3 rd  1930 - September 22 nd  2023    When Phillip A. Bruno donated more than 70 artworks from his personal collection to the Hunterian Gallery in Glasgow in 2019, it was a hugely magnanimous way of celebrating his 90 th  birthday. The resulting exhibition, A Gift from New York to Glasgow, cemented the New York based gallerist’s relationship with both the Hunterian and the city that had become something of a second home.    This came about after the former Associate Director of the Marlborough Gallery was introduced to Clare Henry, the Scottish art critic and New York émigré with whom Bruno would go on to spend the rest of his life. The couple met in 1999 at a New York loft party. They married in 2002, putting the seal on a relationship in which art and life were entwined in a transatlantic adventure that continued for almost a quarter of a century.   The announcement of Bruno’s death aged 93 marks the end of a remarkable life, even as it sets down a legacy by

Mike Travis - An obituary

Mike Travis – drummer, percussionist, actor Born December 2, 1944; died September 4, 2023     Mike Travis, who has died aged 78, was a drummer and actor, who was a creative force from London’s late 1960s and early 1970s jazz scene to Scotland’s thriving alternative theatre circuit and beyond. From residencies at Ronnie Scott’s London jazz club, becoming a founder member of prog band Gilgamesh and playing with former Soft Machine bass player Hugh Hopper, Travis worked extensively with theatre companies such as Wildcat and Communicado.   With the former, Travis appeared in shows such as The Beggar’s Opera (1986), 7:84 Scotland founder John McGrath’s epic, Border Warfare (1989), and The Celtic Story (1998). With the latter, he was a founder member of the Cauld Blast Orchestra, formed by clarinettist Karen Wimhurst to play her music for Jock Tamson’s Bairns, Liz Lochhead’s Robert Burns and Hugh MacDiarmid inspired play performed at Tramway as part of the 1990 Glasgow Year of Culture.   Tra

Michael Boyd - An Obituary

Michael Boyd – t heatre director   Born July 6, 1955; died August 4, 2023      Michael Boyd, who has died aged 68, was a theatre director whose visionary work put the Tron Theatre, Glasgow on the theatrical map, before going on to reinvent the Royal Shakespeare Company on a grand scale. During his decade in Glasgow from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s, Boyd cast Iain Glen in the title role of Macbeth (1993), and directed a radical staging of Janice Galloway’s novel, The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1995), and   Boyd was also instrumental in bringing the work of Quebecois writer Michel Tremblay to Scotland. Working with contemporary Scots translations by Bill Findlay and Martin Bowman, Boyd directed Scottish premieres of The Guid Sisters (1989) and The Real Wurld? (1991), with The Guid Sisters touring to Quebec, setting in motion a Scots/Quebecois cultural exchange that continues today.   Boyd also oversaw a remarkable flowering of artistic talent, with Alan Cumming, Forbes Masson, Peter

Murray Melvin - An Obituary

Murray Melvin – Actor, director, archivist   Born August 10, 1932; died April 14, 2023     Murray Melvin, who has died aged 90, was an actor of elegance, sensitivity and sophistication, whose appearance in Shelagh Delaney’s play, A Taste of Honey (1958) became a key marker of British society’s post World War II mores. Delaney’s taboo busting play was produced by Joan Littlewood and Gerry Raffles’ trailblazing Theatre Workshop company at Theatre Royal, Stratford East, and touched on issues of teenage pregnancy, race and homosexuality in working class Salford.   The latter came through Melvin’s character, Geoffrey, the effete art student friend and surrogate mother of Jo, played in Tony Richardson’s film of the play by Rita Tushingham. At a time when homosexuality was illegal, for an actor to play such a role as Geoffrey made a bold statement.   Melvin was cast on the back of a conversation with Littlewood after the first read through of an early draft of the play. Melvin was making tea

Bob Heatlie - An Obituary

Bob Heatlie – songwriter, musician, record producer Born July 20, 1946; died April 8, 2023     Bob Heatlie, who has died aged 76, was a songwriter and producer whose works topped the charts several times over. His first number one came in 1981 with Japanese Boy, an oriental-tinged one-hit wonder by the kimono-clad Aneka, who in actuality was Edinburgh folk singer Mary Sandeman. Heatlie went on to score the 1985 Christmas number one for Shakin’ Stevens with the Dave Edmunds produced Merry Christmas Everyone.   Japanese Boy came about after Heatlie had recorded several folk albums with Sandeman, who declared her desire to sing a pop song, and encouraged Heatlie to write one for her. Heatlie resisted this, putting off writing anything despite several reminders. When Sandeman booked studio time, Heatlie’s hand was forced, and he stitched several lyrics from previous works around the chorus of what became Japanese Boy.   With Sandeman recast as Aneka, her recording of the song was eventuall