Theatre This article is more than 15 years oldObituaryStanley Eveling
This article is more than 15 years oldPlaywright linked to the Traverse TheatreStanley Eveling, who has died aged 83, was the first playwright to have a new work premiered at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. He was also an academic philosopher, a much-loved teacher at Edinburgh University for more than 30 years, and, in the 1970s and 80s, the influential television critic of the Scotsman. He was one of a great generation of British playwrights, many of whom seized the opportunities of the postwar period to emerge from humble beginnings into lives of creative fulfilment.
Eveling was born in Newcastle, the son of a working-class Newcastle girl and a young Jewish man who left soon after his birth. Raised mainly by his grandmother, who used to tell the neighbours that "wor Stanley's quite bright, y'know", he always felt something of a bookish misfit in the "horrifyingly poor" streets where he was brought up. His work often reflects a characteristic mix of good-hearted common sense and an elaborate private fascination with the inner structures of language and morality. During the second world war, Eveling served as an army officer in the Far East.
After 1945, he took advantage of a government scheme to fast-track former servicemen into higher education, and returned to the north-east to take two degrees in quick succession, shifting from literature to moral philosophy, and moving on to postgraduate work at Oxford University, where he met many other future literary stars, including George MacBeth and Adrian Mitchell.
In 1951, Eveling married Joyce Varty, whom he met while teaching in Cumbria. Four years later he moved to Scotland to take up a post at Aberdeen
University, and, in 1959, he moved to Edinburgh, where he remained for the rest of his academic life. As a writer, he focused at first on poetry. But in the late 1950s he read Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and began to see contemporary theatre, with its potential for surreal, absurdist and poetic approaches, as a field in which he could work. "British theatre in the early 1950s was pretty uninspiring," he said in a 1983 interview, "full of plays with French windows and silly upper-class conversations. But as soon as I read Waiting for Godot, I said, that's it. Home. That's what I'm going to do."
In the early 1960s, Eveling therefore became an enthusiastic supporter of efforts to set up a year-round fringe theatre club in Edinburgh, and, in the summer of 1963, Eveling's The Balachites, a reworking of the Adam and Eve myth, became the first new play produced at the new Traverse Theatre, and the first of more than 20 Eveling plays to be performed over the next two decades. He formed a close, if combative, working relationship with Max Stafford-Clark, director of the Traverse in the late 1960s, and that relationship was to produce some of his most successful plays, including Dear Janet Rosenberg, Dear Mr Kooning (1969) and Our Sunday Times (1971), about the journey of the doomed Atlantic yachtsman Donald Crowhurst. In Edinburgh, Eveling also met Kate Howell, who was to become his second wife and the mother of his children.
By 1983 Eveling's relationship with the Traverse had cooled and his most active period as a playwright was over. But he continued both to teach and to write; even in the last months of his life, he produced several poems, and a new play, Ways to Remember.
Eveling is survived by Joyce, Kate, his four children and 10 grandchildren; and, by the hope, among many friends, that his work will be fully recognised, both for its immense human warmth and for its thoughtful contribution to the development of postwar British drama.
Harry Stanley Eveling, playwright and philosopher, born 4 August 1925; died 24 December 2008
Explore more on these topicsShareReuse this contentncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKuklrSme5FpZ3Jnmpa7cHyUaKqtmZ6hsrp5xK%2BcpaGenHqwrsitrJqqqQ%3D%3D