Oliver Emanuel, who has died aged 43 from brain cancer, was a playwright, teacher and radio dramatist who put his name to some of the most imaginative productions of the last two decades.
If his career was too short, it was still productive and varied. Among his 30-odd plays was the entirely wordless Dragon (2013), in which he told the story of a 12-year-old boy who has not spoken since the death of his mother. Co-produced by the Glasgow company Vox Motus, the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) and the Tianjin People’s Art Theatre, China, it fielded a dazzling sequence of Chinese dragons as a metaphor for the child’s inner turmoil.
