‘Newsnight’s kindest critic’: Bonnie Greer was always effortlessly in command

Playwright was an unusual mix of originality and authority and in high demand as a cultural critic

Bonnie Greer, who has died at the age of 77, moved to the UK from New York in 1986. She grew up in Chicago with six younger siblings. Her father worked in a factory and her mother “kept house”, she said once – in a tone so elegantly ominous, she conjured an image of a woman holding up a full dwelling with seven children in it, with her bare hands. Greer was ambitious and, academically, a high flyer, but abandoned her law degree, facing baked-in sexism from professors. Yet, given she started writing plays aged nine, arguably she was only hastening a creative career that was inevitable.

The Actors Studio was what drew her to the West Village in Manhattan in the late 70s, and she was there at the height of the Aids crisis, a brutal time of mass bereavements and poisonous prejudice. She lost about 35 of her friends, and later told the Sunday Times: “I owe those people my life. If I hadn’t met my gay friends I would be a suburban SUV-driving granny. They taught me the value of insurrection and fun. Nearly 30 years on, I’m still that 25-year-old, on top of some bar, in one of those vintage dresses, dancing with those guys.” But when she arrived, touring, at the Edinburgh festival, it felt like a release, from the “shadow of death”, and a New York theatre scene bereft of its heart. She stayed in the UK permanently.

Greer was a remarkable talent as a playwright: witty, dry, serious, unflinching. She was playwright in residence at the Soho theatre in the late 80s and was writing plays for Radio 3 and 4 by the early 90s. Marilyn and Ella Backstage at the Mocambo, in 2005, is perhaps the most famous, and was later adapted as a stage musical. It dramatises the solidarity between the actor and the singer – Monroe persuaded the club to book Fitzgerald, with the promise that she (mid-1950s, the height of her fame) would sit in the front row every night. Fitzgerald later said she never had to play a small jazz club again thanks to this intervention, and it redrew the boundaries of what was acceptable, in racism, in jazz, in Hollywood. In Greer’s telling, there is no white saviour narrative, only a dynamic creative symbiosis between two geniuses.

Bonnie Greer was a joiner. She was on the board of everything, from the Women’s prize for fiction to the British Museum, she was president of the Brontë society – she got stuck in. An unusual mix of originality and authority, she was in high demand as a cultural critic, particularly in broadcasting. She was a regular contributor to Newsnight Review on BBC Two, as well as a critic for Time Out and a political commentator for newspapers, including this one.

Out of all that came her appearance in 2009 on Question Time with Nick Griffin, then leader of the BNP. It was a frankly bizarre, though not uncharacteristic, bit of political curation from the BBC, since Griffin was a holocaust denier and racist, tried three times and once convicted (in the late 90s) for inciting racial, Islamophobic or antisemitic hatred. Many wondered why the BBC felt such a duty to platform so toxic a figure, and Sayeeda Warsi, also on the panel, asked Greer before whether she was OK to sit next to him (Greer replied: “I’m from Chicago, I’m not scared of this guy”). She said later to the Evening Standard that it was “probably the weirdest and most creepy experience of my life”, but onscreen she was unruffled and effortlessly in command, and she later turned that weird creepiness into an opera for the Royal Opera House, on whose board she also served, along with the London Film School’s.

She was very generous on a panel, receptive and softly spoken while absolutely trenchant, and vividly engaged; she was never without a view. She wrote two novels, Hanging by Her Teeth in 1994 and Entropy in 2009, but her more natural metier was in the discursive, collaborative arts and broader culture. She was once called “Newsnight’s kindest critic”, and said of her stage writing: “I was taught that theatre is supposed to slow the world down so it can be looked at, and the person who looks is not supposed to be the same when they walk out. Otherwise, there’s no fucking point. Art is not a leisure activity. It’s about engagement.”