Pam Gems

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

Pam Gems was often a lone female voice in a predominantly male theatre world. 
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 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