Stanley Eveling - Playwright and academic

IN 1963 Stanley Eveling had The Balachites performed at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre, which had opened at the top of the Royal Mile the previous year. It was the first new play produced by the Traverse and the first play by a Scotland-based writer. Eveling was to write many more plays for the theatre and he joined a group of Scottish writers who spearheaded a new belief in Scottish writing. Eveling responded to the theatre's quirky space and the enlightened policy of the theatre's management. "It was an 'orrible little room," he once wrote. "It was just great."

Harry Stanley Eveling was raised by his mother in Newcastle but was evacuated to Carlisle, which widened his horizons after the back streets of his birthplace. He joined the army and was commissioned while serving in two gruelling theatres of war: Burma and Malaya. After being demobbed he read English and philosophy at Newcastle University before doing a postgraduate degree in philosophy at Oxford.

In 1955 he became a lecturer at Aberdeen University, but in 1959 he moved to Edinburgh University, where he taught moral philosophy for 30 years.

Throughout those years Eveling was also the television critic of The Scotsman. His Saturday column was required reading and is remembered for its perceptive opinions, robust style and uncompromising views on broadcasting.

Eveling had written poems and plays and delighted in maintaining the two disciplines of his career: the academic and theatre. Indeed, the one fed off the other. He once commented: "Philosophy teaches you that all arguments are ultimately feeble. I'm more interested in people than points of view."

He was principally recognised throughout Scotland as a playwright. His plays deal with aspects of humanity and have a fierce intellectualism. He saw an early production of Beckett's Waiting For Godot and was enthused. "Two people all alone on the stage: mysterious and a play full of possibilities," he said.

The Balachites reflected Eveling's love of word games and the rapid transposition of scenes added a sensation of the surreal. The Scotsman's Joyce McMillan wrote of it as "a whimsical modern re-examination of the Adam and Eve myth". It was directed at the Traverse by Terry Lane (who was soon to depart in some acrimony) and enjoyed considerable success from the outset.

Significantly, the play was given an evening reading in 1993 when the Traverse staged a 40th anniversary season. Then the cast, led by Russell Hunter, and the play were well received.

Eveling preferred to remain in Edinburgh and pursue a life as an academic and playwright. "I liked my job too much," he explained. For his plays, he liked to draw on his own experiences. Certainly, his plays impressed leading directors and actors, as is evidenced by the impressive casts the Traverse assembled for their premieres.

The then artistic director of the Traverse, Max Stafford-Clark, commissioned several plays from him and has written of Eveling: "Stanley's work was lyrical and funny, often including tramps and jokes, a combination of the highest metaphysical speculations and Morecambe and Wise.

"In rehearsal I remember a sense of playfulness, but you were always aware that you were talking to someone with a brilliant mind. Sometimes a play can hit the moment and the writer suddenly has access to the popular imagination. Dear Janet was one of those plays."

Dear Janet Rosenberg, Dear Mr Kooning tells of a relationship between a young girl and an older writer that falls apart and Eveling dramatically ends the play with the author's collapse into drunken suicide. The play transferred to the Royal Court in London and at the Traverse had a cast led by Tony Haygarth and Susan Carpenter.

In 1968 The Strange Case Of Martin Richter was directed at the Hampstead Theatre Club by Michael Blakemore and starred Leonard Rossiter as a butler who initiates a below-stairs rebellion against a Nazi household. "Eveling writes with assurance and panache," one critic commented.

In 1971 Eveling wrote Come Back and Be Killed starring Francesca Annis, and the following year he had another success with Caravaggio Buddy, which was presented at the Traverse on the Edinburgh Fringe. It was a madcap farce – the scene changed from a meeting with Jesus to a climb of Mount Everest – and starred Ian Holm. In his review of the play, BA Young in the Financial Times praised Eveling's writing and commented that the Traverse was "arguably the most influential theatre in our island". Much of that renown was thanks to the innovative plays of Stanley Eveling.

Eveling had an ability to touch the button of the moment. He captured the essence of an idea and transported it to the stage with a beguiling facility. He was interested in politics but was never an ideologue. He remained delightfully sceptical but retained a steadfast belief in the individual and displayed a compassion and understanding to the very end.

But the 20 plays he wrote are his real legacy. They, like the one he completed just before the onset of his final illness (Ways to Remember), deserve closer attention from a new generation of directors.

Eveling was twice married. He is survived by his second wife, Kate, and their four children.