Friends & Colleagues

Noël Greig

Noël Greig, writer, director, mentor, teacher and dramaturg died in September2009.

Noël was a theatre maker who helped to change British theatre through his pioneering work and The REP was fortunate to have worked with Noël over the last ten years, developing a young writers’ programme Transmissions. He will be sadly missed but his vision lives on around The REP through the voices of young writers.

I knew I was in the presence of a great teacher the first day I went into a Transmissions Saturday workshop. Transmissions was The REP’s young writers’ programme, and part of my new job as Literary Officer in 2000 was to look after this. Noël Greig and Carl Miller were the tutors to 20 writers aged 12 – 25. Transmissions was to take over most of my working life for the next 6 years – I like to call them the golden years where the craft of playwriting and the power of playwriting as a tool for social, personal and creative expression was tried and tested through the rigorous challenge and privilege of developing new voices that took over the theatre each year in a summer festival.

Noël had a way of making everyone feel special, that everyone had a voice that needed to be heard and nurtured. That everyone had a story to tell that was worth listening to. He had great skill at unearthing the truth of the idea and pushing the writers to realise their own styles. It didn’t matter to Noël if you were 12 or 25, the most important thing was to tell your story.

I spent hours documenting his teachings and absorbing his techniques with writers and with actors in the rehearsal room and then translating these into young writers’ programmes for young people who didn’t have easy access to The REP. Outreach programmes evolved, spreading Noël’s message by unlocking creative talent through the power of playwriting in many schools and pupil referral units across the city. My last conversation with Noël was about spreading this work further and getting playwriting into the national curriculum, something I won’t stop now until it is realised.

Noël was a pioneer throughout his life and I am so grateful that my path crossed with his, a man who certainly changed my view of the world by opening up to me the power of playwriting and its accessibility to everyone. His work lives on in The REP’s work with over 500 young writers and continues to grow.

Carl Miller, writer, director, dramaturg and teacher continues to have a long association with the REP and new writing and was the other great teacher, working alongside Noël. Carl remembers the impact Noël made on his life from an early age:

“As a teenage playwright I was inspired by Nöel Grieg. I did not
imagine that twenty years later I’d be with him week by week, year by
year, at The REP, watching him encourage new generations of
writers to express their unique perspectives on the world. Over the
years of working together and friendship, we probably spent more time
together at The REP than anywhere else. I can hardly imagine that I
won’t ever see him there again.

You can learn from Noël’s books that he had an unequalled fund of
techniques and exercises to get people working creatively. But they
can’t really express how his personality pulled out the potential from
those with whom he worked. He had the same enthusiasm and high
expectations for a fragmentary work by someone who had hardly written
a scene before as he did as a professional commenting on colleagues’
plays. He genuinely believed that other people’s stories had power and
were worth telling – a rare quality in a profession often marked by
self-centred egomania.

Not that Noël was untheatrical. In fact his early days in the
resolutely non-experimental world of weekly rep came in very handy for
the Transmissions Festival, when directing a dozen short plays, from
pet-shop comedies to gothic murders, in a frantic fortnight. He could
draw on examples from Shakespeare or Chekhov, but he was also a
veteran of experimental theatre dating back to Brighton’s pioneering
Combination, which he founded with friends in the 1960s. Watching him
work, you could feel the synthesis of his deep faith in the power of
theatre as an ancient art form, combined with a conviction that it was
worth nothing if it could not communicate passionately here and now.

At Noël’s funeral, we heard from schoolfriends how he had inspired
them in 1950s Skegness. Meanwhile on Facebook you could read the
tributes from those who had been inspired by Noël as twenty-first
century schoolchildren. Noël lives on, not in pious memorials, but in
the imaginations he has touched. He was in Palestine and Iran this
year – those workshops with very different people will have been in
crucial respects the same as those he led in rooms around The
REP. He will have listened as well as led, taking his cues from
whoever he met, like a great actor, in the moment.

Does theatre transform the world? Through his work and his friendship,
Noël changed my world. And there are others all over the planet (and
many of them in Birmingham, thanks to Transmissions) who will tell you
the same. So despite the sadness at knowing we will not sit in The REP
and talk again, I take comfort in the fact that the seeds he has
planted in so many hearts and minds are coming to fruition all around
us. I cannot think of a life more richly led.”

David Watson was one of the first young writers Noël worked with at The REP. David arrived in his early teens with a great talent and Noël was pleased to call him a friend when he directed his play 10 years later at last year’s Transmissions 10th birthday festival. Transmissions was never intended to find the next generation of playwrights but Noël had great skill at discovering talent and David is now leading the way as one of the country’s most exciting young playwrights and he remembers his ‘early days’:

“Noël Greig was the first person who ever talked to me about plays, or playwriting, or the theatre, when I joined the Transmissions programme back in 1999. At the time, writing plays was barely a hobby for me. Now it’s how I make most of my living. I don’t think that would be the case if it wasn’t for Noël.

His huge generosity of spirit was manifest in the way he nurtured and energised a quite strikingly diverse group of young writers – from not-quite-teenagers to university graduates. The sensitivity and playfulness with which he brought our plays to life, directing readings in the annual Transmissions Festival, was an inspiration.”

The REP will seem an emptier place without him. But I like to think Noël will make for a very benevolent theatre ghost – probably with tobacco and rizlas in one hand, probably a handful of scripts in the other, probably smiling.

Caroline Jester