A Provincial Life

Born into a bourgeois family, Misail determines to find a way to lead an honest life free from privilege. To his father's disapproval and bewilderment, he renounces his heritage and becomes a workman before moving to the country to manage the estate of the girl that he marries. Over the course of a long summer, his burning sense of injustice and deep integrity exact a devastating forfeit. Peter Gill's A Provincial Life, based on a novella by Anton Chekhov, opened at the Sherman Cymru, Cardiff, in March 2012 in a production by National Theatre Wales.

Peter Gill was born in 1939 in Cardiff and started his professional career as an actor. A director as well as a writer, he has directed over a hundred productions in the UK, Europe and North America. At the Royal Court Theatre in the sixties, he was responsible for introducing D. H. Lawrence's plays to the theatre. The founding director of Riverside Studios and the National Theatre Studio, Peter Gill lives in London. His plays include The Sleepers Den (Royal Court, London, 1965), A Provincial Life (Royal Court, 1966), Over Gardens Out (Royal Court, 1968), Small Change (Royal Court, 1976), Kick for Touch (National Theatre, London, 1983), Cardiff East (National Theatre, 1997), Certain Young Men (Almeida Theatre, London, 1999), The York Realist (English Touring Theatre, 2001), Original Sin (Sheffield Crucible, 2002), Another Door Closed (Theatre Royal, Bath, 2009), A Provincial Life (National Theatre of Wales, Sherman Cymru, Cardiff, 2011), Versailles (Donmar Warehouse, London, 2014) and As Good a Time as Any (Print Room at the Coronet, 2015).