We were heartbroken to learn of the death in August 2020 of Edinburgh-based director Marilyn Imrie.

Marilyn was a prolific radio and drama director, spending her working life travelling and working between London and Edinburgh chiefly, and we felt extremely privileged to have been able to have her as director of our most successful production in 2017.

In 2015, Marilyn invited our writer Anna Carlisle to create a play on the life of Joan Eardley RSA, with a view to performing it in front of Eardley paintings at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh and then on an art-gallery-based touring production across Scotland and England. With Anna Carlisle and Alexandra Mathie, Marilyn saw the entire development of Joan Eardley: A Private View through from 2015 to its premiere - to huge acclaim - at Modern 2, NGS in May 2017.

Marilyn was an inspirational director, allowing the company free rein to explore, improvise and innovate, and she was the epitome - to all - of encouragement, praise and kindness. It was the happiest of productions. She could engender genius from everyone. It was Marilyn’s own inspired idea that the music of the production should all be live and ‘human’ - song, sound and instruments - which created a most evocative and poignant dimension to the play.

We know that everyone involved in the making of Joan Eardley: A Private View - actors, stage and design teams, music and artwork practitioners, the marketing and media team, the Adult Learning team at NGS, all our venue providers and supporters-in-kind and, of course, the audiences - will be as devastated as we are, and it is also on their behalf that we make this tribute to Marilyn.

Marilyn’s untimely death from MND at the age of 72 will only inspire us to go on as strongly as before and to continue to create - as we know she would wish it - beautiful work, couched in beautiful language and steeped in beautiful music.