Remembering Peter Thomson

Even in this accelerated, overheated moment, news sometimes travels rather slower than you might think, and that’s how it was we missed, until recently, that Peter Thomson, who was head of the Drama Department at Exeter during our studies there, died in May.

I think none of us were so much in touch with Peter or with other folk from the department since our studies, barring the odd encounter perhaps during our relatively rare performances in Exeter, or on other trips to the city, not much more than that. But Peter’s death certainly gives a strong moment to pause and reflect.

I can still remember almost word for word the short letter he wrote me personally after I’d been at the interview/audition weekend prior to admission, in which he extended an offer to study Single Honours Drama if my proposed path (to combine English and Drama) didn’t work out with the grades. This ‘plan B’ wasn’t needed in the end, but Peter’s kindness in writing, and the recognition it staged – that I was someone they would actively want to study in the department – made a difference to me.

The ragged group that slowly formed the original Forced Entertainment crew met whilst studying Drama there at Exeter (joined by Deborah and Huw Chadbourn), connecting across the cohorts of a number of years. Aesthetically of course we ‘had our differences’ with the Department – as you might expect, given the generational and cultural divides that separated us – and so for us, the relation was at some level defined initially by our sense of difference – the drives and modes we sought were different, had different outcomes, or so we felt obliged to insist.

It didn’t take long though to realise that there was (and remains) a serious debt of honour in the direction of Peter and the department he headed. After all, Drama at Exeter placed its faith in critical knowledge and learning made through practice, valuing group work, and insisting that insights gained in the studio, in improvisation, through training – were of at-least-equal value to those arrived at through other forms of investigation. Operating largely out of the Thornlea building, away from the main University Campus, the Department was an art school in that sense – a place for doing, doing, and discovering together. Without that – and without that autonomous space Peter and his colleagues held fiercely and against the institutional grain – I think I can say confidently that there would be no Forced Entertainment. In our different ways, members of the group all took things from the department’s toolbox, transforming or neglecting them, according to our own needs and in relation to the other influences and interests which drove us. But the Department was without doubt the ground we sprang from, and Peter’s generosity, good humour, shrewdness, and rigour were a huge part in that process. He had a special capacity to reflect on theatre, and on situations and processes that was level-headed and positive without ever being soft.

A year group in Combined Honours Drama at Exeter back at that time comprised a total of 12 students, same for Single Honours. That’s how small a cohort we were, something unimaginable in today’s higher education. And the basis of all our work was long studio projects – five or ten weeks devoted to one practical investigation or another, I don’t know, maybe twenty studio hours per week spent together, more at intensive times. Those processes were perplexing, frustrating, and inspiring in different measures. Unpredictable. Good. Bad. Formative for sure. It’s a radical model that, unlikely and hard-fought as it was at the time, is completely beyond conception at this point. It was a lot. And it made a huge difference to us. The nature of education being what it was back then, I don’t recall ever having even a general conversation with any member of staff about ‘how I was doing’, much less about ‘grades’, ‘learning objectives’, or ‘career paths’. You did the work. The work makes the group. The studio is the only valid testbed, the dynamic ground for everything. That’s all there was to it.

Peter was plenty smart, obviously, but he was also grounded in a way that sometimes your wannabe experimental theatre makers like me weren’t. He saw a performance I’d made on campus with a few other people around 1981, throughout which one figure was senselessly flicking a radio onstage from one station to another – *during the Exeter FC match that was happening that evening* – fragmenting the live radio commentary of the match and I suppose just being very frustrating to someone like Peter who’d have just as happily have been at the match as sitting in the theatre. What kind of person is this, Peter asked me later about the figure onstage, who’d be listening to the commentary for a minute and then switching to some indie station, static, or the shipping forecast, and then back to the football for a moment? He really did have a point, though a defence available only in retrospect, might be that we were just setting out on our artistic mission to figure out exactly that – what kind of a person that might be? Certainly, the restless flicking from station to station does not seem to have stopped.
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Years later I seem to remember Peter telling me affably that one of the handful of Forced Entertainment pieces he saw was “too clever” for him, and while I know he meant something else (too clever for its own good perhaps, or somehow rather inaccessible!), it didn’t land as reproach, more as his wry sceptical way to acknowledge that we’d taken devising and group work off into a territory that wasn’t especially for him, and that was OK.

Reflecting now, it’s a joy to mark and celebrate the singular generosity that Peter had – contributing to the field in so many ways, making his own hugely significant research path and at the same time opening space and possibility for others, all the while I think quietly tuning the people he encountered to questions about the ethical, political and social potentialities of the form.

Performance, or theatre – as opposed to Drama. The singular knowledge inherent in doing. Tonight we are raising a hearty glass to Peter, from Sheffield, from London, from Berlin, with huge thanks.

Art, love and politics.

Tim Etchells, for Forced Entertainment,
25 June 2026.

You can find the Guardian obituary for Peter, written by David Edgar, here.
http://[https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2026/jun/14/peter-thomson-obituary]

There’s also a tribute from Peter’s family which also includes reflections from other colleagues, ex-students and friends of Peter’s.
https://aperfectmine.wordpress.com/