R.I.P. Pam Gems

[Reza]

Pam Gems obituary

One of Britain's leading female playwrights,
known for Piaf, Queen Christina and Stanley
Lyn Gardner

Pam Gems was often a lone female voice in a
predominantly male theatre world. Photograph: Jane Bown

In her best-known work, Piaf, the playwright Pam
Gems, who has died aged 85, developed a new form
somewhere between the musical and a play with
music to tell the story of the celebrated French
singer. Produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in
1978, Piaf transferred to the West End and Broadway,
bringing Gems mainstream success. Jamie Lloyd's
revival at the Donmar in London in 2008 gave new
life to Piaf with an astonishing lead performance by Elena Roger.

Gems's long association with the RSC included
Queen Christina (1977), in which she explored a
filmic style of writing and the sadness of
childlessness through the life of the Swedish
monarch, who was raised as a boy. Camille,
produced by the RSC in 1984, echoed Piaf's
storyline of a woman seeking sexual and economic
independence, with Gems rescuing Alexandre
Dumas's story from romantic mythology and serving
it up as a desperate tale of the high price women
pay for love. Her RSC productions included The
Danton Affair (1986) and The Blue Angel (1991), a
version of the story made famous by Josef von
Sternberg's classic film starring Marlene Dietrich.

The worldwide success of Piaf heralded a series
of plays in which Gems reconsidered the lives of
iconic women. At their least convincing, these
were no more than biopics for the stage that
provided star turns for star actors. This was the
case with Marlene (1996), which took the form of
a concert given by Dietrich in Paris. At their
very best such as Piaf, Camille, Queen
Christina and Pasionaria (1985) they debunked
myths and put women's experiences centre-stage in
a way that was unusual in the 1980s and remains
rare today. Her plays were big, untidy and
sometimes clumsy, but always filled with a
wonderful emotional generosity and intelligence.

She was born Pamela Price in Bransgore,
Hampshire, and had her first play a tale of
goblins and elves staged when she was eight by
her fellow pupils at primary school. She won a
place at Brockenhurst grammar school and studied
psychology at Manchester University, marrying the
architect Keith Gems after she had taken her degree.

It was not until 1970, when she moved to London
with Keith and their four children, that she
began writing in earnest. She had at that point
been writing for 20 years with almost no success,
so "decided that I might as well fail doing
something I enjoy". The London fringe in the
early 1970s was a place of many possibilities for
new writers, new forms and new ways of looking at
the world. It was there that Gems, a large,
straight-talking woman with a wicked laugh, whose
horror of any kind of pretension had its roots in
her working-class upbringing, found her voice in
the burgeoning feminist theatre movement.

It was a voice that was salty, earthy, raunchy
and never boring, and which had a youthful dash
even when Gems herself was far from young. She
was fond of telling the story of her first
encounter with the director Howard Davies, who
directed Piaf for the RSC. He found it difficult
to believe that such a rude play could have been
written by a middle-aged mother of four.

Gems's early plays reflected the changing roles
of women, and were typified by Go West, Young
Woman, produced by the newly formed Women's
Company at the Roundhouse in London in 1974,
which looked at the experience of the early
American female pioneers who began in crinoline
and ended up in buckskin. Writing about women's
lives was a deliberate decision: "It's not that I
don't feel that I can write about men, but when
you see the great uncharted waters, the notion of
dealing with 2,000 years of men's history just
isn't very tempting. When I came to the theatre
in the early 70s, I realised that there was no
authentic work about women: they were
occasionally celebrated but never convincingly explored."

Her first commercial success was Dusa, Fish, Stas
and Vi, which premiered at the Edinburgh festival
in 1976 and transferred to the West End. It was
one of the first plays to examine what it felt
like to be a young woman living through times
when the influence of the women's movement and
the availability of the pill offered liberation
from traditional roles as housewife and mother
but threw up other issues of self-fulfilment. The
play, which was included in the National
theatre's list of 100 plays of the 20th century,
was all the more remarkable because it was
written by a woman who was a wife and mother and
whose own writing career had been forged from
hastily scribbled scenes written between serving
up the children's tea and doing the washing up.

Gems had a thrifty housewife's attitude to her
work, never throwing anything away and often
recycling it: one of her final plays, Mrs Pat,
about the relationship between the actor Mrs
Patrick Campbell and
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/bernardshaw>George
Bernard Shaw, was produced by the Theatre Royal
in York in 2006, more than 15 years after she had first started writing it.

Produced at the Playhouse theatre in Newcastle in
1985, Pasionaria drew parallels between the
contemporary miners' strike and the uprising of
the Asturian miners in northern Spain in 1934,
just before the Spanish civil war. A big and
big-hearted play, it proved Gems's belief that
"all theatre is political in a profound way. It
can, without resort to the vote or the gun, alter
climate, change opinion, laugh prejudice out of
the door, soften hearts, awaken perception."

Stanley, based on the life of the painter Stanley
Spencer, was staged at the National theatre in
1996, with Antony Sher in the lead. After that
production, Gems never again achieved a major
success with an original new play. She had also
tried her hand at novels and may well have
written a partial self-portrait in Mrs Frampton,
about an overweight, middle-aged woman who becomes virtually invisible.

She proved herself an adept translator of other
playwrights' work and created outstanding
versions of Lorca's Yerma, Ibsen's Lady from the
Sea and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, directed by
Jonathan Miller at the Crucible in Sheffield in
2007. She never stopped writing new plays. At the
Drill Hall in London in 2009 there was a
rehearsed reading of Winterlove, about the
relationship between Elisabeth of Austria and Ludwig II of Bavaria.

Like the characters in Go West, Young Woman, Gems
was undoubtedly a pioneer, storming theatre's
main stages at a time when Agatha Christie was
still the most frequently performed female
playwright in Britain. Often a lone voice in a
predominantly male theatre world, she showed the
way for subsequent generations of female
playwrights, proving that it is possible to be
popular and pungent at the same time. She is
survived by Keith and her children, Jonathan, Sara, David and Elizabeth.

Iris Pamela Gems, playwright, born 1 August 1925; died 13 May 2011