Section:GDN 1J PaGe:9 Edition Date:190724 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 23/7/2019 17:51 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
Wednesday 24 July 2019 The Guardian •9
Zaheer Abbas, cricketer, 72 ; Sir John
Bond, banker, 78 ; Julia Bradbury,
broadcaster, 49; Lynda Carter, actor
and singer, 68; Sir Trevor Chinn,
businessman and philanthropist,
84; Michael Coveney, drama critic,
71; Tracey Crouch, Conservative
MP, 44; Danny Dyer, actor, 42;
Catherine Destivelle, mountaineer,
59 ; Jon Faddis, jazz trumpeter,
66; Prof Frank Close, particle
physicist, 74; Andy Gomarsall,
rugby player, 45 ; Martin Keown,
footballer and commentator, 53 ;
Jennifer Lopez, actor and singer,
50 ; Ruth Mackenzie, former artistic
director, the Holland festival, 62 ;
Elisabeth Moss, actor, 37; The
Right Rev James Newcome, bishop
of Carlisle, 66; Anna Paquin,
actor, 37; Lord (David) Simon of
Highbury, businessman and former
Labour minister, 80; Lord (Chris)
Smith of Finsbury, former Labour
cabinet minister, 68 ; Quinlan
Terry, architect, 82; Gus van Sant,
fi lm director, 67; Catherine Wyn-
Rogers, mezzo-soprano, 65.In 2015, Peter Whitehead (obituary,
15 June) gave us his papers,
production fi les, manuscripts,
pottery, posters, photographs and
sculpture so that we could curate an
archive in his name for the Cinema
and Television History Research
Institute at De Montfort University,
Leicester. Creativity fl owed through
everything he did in his work and
life, including the stories, which
the archive also reveals, of the
talented women with whom Peter
was romantically involved and
collaborated artistically.
Steve Chibnall and Alissa ClarkeT
he playwright and
director Philip
Osment , who has
died aged 66 from
complications
arising from pul-
monary fi brosis,
started out as an
actor and leading member of the
pioneering fringe theatre company
Gay Sweatshop in the late 1970s and
80s. He went on to become a widely
respected playwright , on subjects that
ranged from Shakespeare to social
issues, in particular writing plays for
young people that cover ed sexuality,
mental health, prison and drugs.
This Island’s Mine – his elegiac plea
for acceptance of those at the fringes
of mainstream society – became
a rallying cry for resistance when
fi rst produced by Gay Sweatshop in
1988, at the height of the campaign
against Section 28, the law banning
“promotion” of homosexuality. The
play’s fi rst revival , three decades
later, which Philip attended, opened
at the King’s Head theatre, Islington,
north London, a week before he died.
Osment sometimes struggled
to grasp the impact of his talent
and the infl uence his work had on
others. He had a gift for listening.
People came to him lacking con-
fi dence and feeling vulnerable ;
they left reassured. As a gay man,
he understood the pain of being the
outsider and empathised with many
who felt themselves excluded.
Some critics called him an English
Chekhov. Like Peter Gill, Robert
Holman, Barney Norris and his great
friend and colleague Lin Coghlan ,
Philip was a “quietist ” playwright ,
seeming to hear and catch the
quiet footfalls and pulse of life and
relationships beneath the social skin.
Born in Barnstaple, Devon, into
a farming family, Philip was the son
of Honor (nee Kingswell) and Tom
Osment. From Barnstaple grammar
school he went to Keble College,
Oxford, where he studied modern
languages and acted with the Oxford
University Dramatic Society. After
graduating in 1974, he took an
acting course at Webber Douglas in
London and worked as an actor with
the alternative theatre companies
Gay Sweatshop, Half Moon and
Shared Experience, with whose
director, Mike Alfreds , he went on
to collaborate extensively.
Osment’s work had at its heart
a passionate political awareness.
This sensibility drew him to
Gay Sweatshop, formed in 1975
to portray gay experience. ThePhilip Osment
Director and playwright
determined to speak for
those on society’s margins
company nurtured new writing and
toured universities, small theatres
and working men’s clubs, helping
to transform social attitudes. At
Sweatshop Osment met Noël
Greig , its charismatic dramaturg
and director , an encounter
that developed into one of the
defi ning personal and professional
relationships of Osment’s life.
His fi rst play, an autobiographical
one-man show, Telling Tales, was
written for the company in 1982.
This was followed by This Island’s
Mine (1988) and The Undertaking
(1997). His association with Alfreds,
the director of Shared Experience
from 1975 to 1987 and then of the
Cambridge Theatre Company from
1991, resulted in the commissioning
of Osment’s much admired Devon
trilogy: The Dearly Beloved (1993),
which won the 1993 Writers’ Guild
award, What I Did in the Holidays
( 1995) and Flesh and Blood (1996).
Buried Alive followed in 1999.
In 2003 Osment and Alfreds worked
with L amda students on Collateral
Damage , about the Oklahoma City
bombing in 1995 , and they joined
forces again as translator and director
on Cervantes’ Pedro, the Great
Pretender for the RSC’s Spanish Golden
Age season at the Swan, Stratford-
upon-Avon, and in the West End.
Alfreds remember ed his times
with Osment as some of the happiest
and most fulfi lling experiences of
his career. “Each piece he wrote for
me was the most wonderful gift a
director could ever receive. ”
Over the years, Osment worked
with young people’s theatre groups
across the country. For Red Ladder
Theatre Company he wrote Who’s
Breaking? (1989) and Sleeping Dogs
(1993), a version of Romeo and Juliet
relocated to the Balkans. For Theatre
Centre , he wrote Listen (1990). At TChe met Coghlan and they developed
a close creative relationship that
included The Night Garden, written
by Coghlan at the National Theatre
studio, with Osment as dramaturg
and director , and With Love from
Nicolae (1997), a co-production –
directed by Osment – between the
Bristol Old Vic and Teatrul Dramatic
in Constanţa, Romania. They were
working together on a play at the time
of his death. Another commission
came from the Contact theatre in
Manchester, where his play Wise
Guys (1998) was performed as its
inaugural production.
His play for young people, Little
Violet and the Angel (2001), was
co-winner of the Peggy Ramsay
award. Leaving, for the Irish
company Quare Hawks, toured
Ireland in 2002. His adaptation of
Hans Christian Anders en’s The Ugly
Duckling – Duck! – was a hit for the
Unicorn theatre in London in 2007,
turning the 19th-century fairy story
into a modern urban morality tale
set on Hampstead Heath.
For Graeae, the UK’s leading
theatre company for performers
with disabilities, he directed his
own translation of Molière’s George
Dandin (2006). In the same year he
became an associate artist with the
Liverpool-based young people’s
theatre company 20 Stories High, for
which he wrote Whole (2013), about
sexuality and religion.
Even with failing health – his
pulmonary fi brosis was diagnosed
in 2011 and he underwent a lung
transplant in 2016 – his commitment
to writing for young people and
those on the margins never wavered.
Some of his most productive work,
under extreme health pressures,
came with the teacher and director
Jim Pope. After completing a
project together at the National
Youth theatre, Osment and Pope
established their own company,
Playing On, to collaborate with
ex-off enders and those excluded
from the education system.
Two plays resulted: Inside, about
young fathers in prison, and Hearing
Things , a typically sensitive, even-
handed portrait of those working in
the mental health system looked at
from both sides, patients and staff.
Can I Help You?, which deals with
similar themes, was in the pipeline
during his fi nal few weeks.
One of the driving motivators
for Osment’s work – though he
challenged traditional defi nitions
of it – was family. He felt blessed in
later years to fi nd himself with one
of his own through the close bond he
shared with his partner, Nina Ward,
her daughter and grandchildren –
unexpected and all the sweeter for
one from that generation of gay men
who had assumed their sexuality
would preclude such a possibility.
He is survived by Nina , her
daughter, Emma , and Emma’s
children, Alice and Zach.
Carole WoddisPhilip Osment, playwright, director
and actor, born 1 March 1953; died
24 May 2019Osment was a
leading member
of the pioneering
fringe theatre
company Gay
Sweatshop in
the late 1970s
and 80s. He
understood the
pain of being an
outsider and had
a gift for listeningAnnouncements
He turned
The Ugly
Duckling
into a
modern
urban
morality
tale set on
Hampstead
HeathBirthdays
[email protected]
@guardianobitsElisabeth Moss,
the actor, is 37
today. She has a
lead role in the
TV drama series
The Handmaid’s
Tale, currently
being shown on
Channel 4Letter
Peter WhiteheadРЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS