In memory of Charlie Nowolskielski. To celebrate a wonderful theatre artist.

(because there's a memorial event in his honour happening this afternoon..

One of the first plays The Scotsman sent me to review outside the Festival was in a weird disused cinema. It was by the railway lines in Abbeyhill and you could hear the trains passing.

It was an unknown venue, putting on an unknown play by an unknown author performed by an unknown company and I had no idea what to expect.

But when I came out two and a bit hours later I was so full of joy and wonder it was like I was walking on air.

The play was “The Shepherd Beguiled” by Netta Blair Reid and the music was by Richard Cherns and the company was called Theatre Alba and the director was Charles Nowolskielski and as I walked back up Regent Road to my bus stop I was crying with happiness.

My rave review earned me £13, and the dole deducted every penny of it, but what mattered was that I’d been given a vision.

A vision of how theatre could be. A theatre that wasn’t built on dreary realism of the kind I assumed I was expected to write but knew I never could… but a theatre built of poetry, grounded to the earth, but also totally suffused with spirituality and magic.

I was totally in awe of Charlie after that and so moved when he turned up for the Edinburgh Playwrights’ Workshop reading of my first play, “How Like An Angel”.

In those days I used to reproach myself bitterly for not being able to write like everyone else, and think my work was crap as a consequence.

But Charlie was respectful and positive and encouraging and told me he’d like to stage my play and set it in a wood.

Because the play was set in the ward of a mental hospital I couldn’t understand how that would work. But who knows. He was probably right…

What he taught me in those early days what that it was OK to be different. And that was so incredibly valuable to me.

Later, I dramatised “Great Expectations” and had a huge success with it. The show was created in collaboration with a dance company, and their moves were so important to it. I couldn’t imagine the script working without them, and couldn’t think of a way of putting them into stage directions, and so assumed no-one would be able to stage it.

But Charlie knew otherwise, programmed it for the Lyric, Belfast, when he was their artistic director.

So he taught me that my work could get second productions.

It made me very happy to be able to help him a bit, perhaps, years later, and do new adaptations of “The Seagull” and “The Cherry Orchard” for Theatre Alba’s seasons in Duddingston Kirk gardens.

I’ve worked with a lot of really good directors; and Charlie was up there with the best. He had this brilliant instinct with how a text could work in the space; and having been an actor himself, he had a real way of getting the best performances out of people.

I experienced that for myself later on when he cast me as The Angel in “To The Cross”; and so he helped me discover myself as a performer.

That’s when I also discovered what a good writer he was. The play would begin in the manse garden, and then Jesus would carry his cross through Duddingston village.

As the angel, I had to go with Jesus on his last journey; and it always made me cry my eyes out.

I never really knew if angels are supposed to cry, but I always did; and like everyone else I always gasped when, at the end of my speech announcing the resurrection, Jesus would appear standing on the wall beside Duddingston loch.

And it always looked as if he were walking on water…

Charlie had a way with that space. I’ll never forget the way he cast that loch as the lake in “The Seagull” or managed to make the garden convince everybody we were shut up in an attic for “The Diary of Anne Frank”.

He was, quite simply, a prodigiously talented man of the theatre.

The sadness was that he wasn’t that good at managing that talent. He would tend to make enemies of people and of institutions who he needed to keep as friends.

Most notoriously with the Scottish Arts Council. So for twenty years he ran those amazing festival seasons beside Duddingston loch, and built up a wonderful company of talented actors who came back years after year because they loved him.

He created wonderful, beautiful work there year after year. The sadness was that it was mostly unheralded, unreviewed, and unappreciated outside his faithful audience who also came back year after year - also because they loved him.

And it was all miraculously produced on half a frayed shoestring. I so wanted it to be properly funded and properly appreciated and properly praised. I wanted him to have the worldly success he so richly deserved.

But that wasn’t to be. My late partner, who also loved and admired him, used to mischievously refer to him as “Charlie Nova Scotia”. Which would have riled him, because he was so proud of his Polish heritage.

But what she meant, I think, was that Charlie was a bit of an exile in this world.

He didn’t belong to this Scotland, but to a different Scotland. A new Scotland, with art and solidarity at the heart of it.

That’s what he lived for, and that’s what he helped create.