Linda Griffiths

Linda Griffiths, who has died aged 60 after a battle with breast cancer, was as wildly inspiring as she was wildly inspired, both as an actress and a playwright in her native Canada and beyond.

Nowhere was this more evident than in Age of Arousal, Griffiths' 2007 play set in a nineteenth century secretarial college where five women search for emancipation in very different ways.

In her programme notes for Muriel Romanes' 2011 production of the play for the Stellar Quines theatre company at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, Griffiths described finding inspiration in George Gissing's novel, The Odd Women, which she discovered in the dollar bin of a second-hand bookshop.

"I turned it over, and on the back it said 'Five Victorian Spinsters'," Griffiths said in an interview with The Herald at the time of the production, "and I thought, oh, that's juicy. I'm so interested in the idea of spinsters, and I wanted to feel I had the freedom to be wildly inspired by it, but not do any traditional adaptation.

"So it's a collaboration between me and George Gissing. Now he's dead, but if anyone is still doing any of my plays in 100 years' time, I will let them mess with them."

Her play was completely different in tone from Gissing's novel. However, she said: "It's playful, dangerous and there's that bomb inside it. In Gissing's book there's the bomb, but there is no soufflé around it and no sense of humour. No-one goes to Berlin to smoke and wear trousers in the book as they do in my play, which is meant to show the restriction of the age, but in a way so we also see the freedom that was building. I've a natural rebellious temperament, so I was never going to write a conventional costume drama, and I was always more interested in what was underneath than what was on top."

In Age of Arousal, which in Romanes' production featured equally wild costumes created by students from Edinburgh College of Art, Griffiths used something she called 'thoughtspeak'. This found each character expressing their inner yearnings in a torrent of words that expressed their internal emotions.

When it happened to all the characters at once, it resembled little symphonies of words. This was just one of the flamboyant theatrical devices used by Griffiths to play with form in a way that left her too weird for the mainstream, but not odd enough to be considered avant garde.

Griffiths is regarded as one of the most vital voices to come out of contemporary Canadian theatre. She was born in Montreal, where she studied at St Thomas' High School, graduated from Dawson College, earned a teaching certificate from McGill University and spent a year at the National Theatre School before her rebellious urges led to her being asked to leave.

Griffiths moved to Saskatoon, where she was a founding member of the politically charged 25th Street Theatre and one of the creators of some of the company's most seminal works, including If You're So Good, Why Are You in Saskatoon? in 1975 and 1978's Paper Wheat, a history of Saskatchewan's co-operative movement.

At the Theatre Passe Muraille, Griffiths made her name with Maggie and Pierre, a solo play about the Canadian prime minister, his wife and a reporter, which she developed with director Paul Thompson and performed in 1980. Maggie and Pierre won Griffiths the Dora Mavor Moore Award both for outstanding performance in a leading role and for outstanding new play.

She would win the latter three more times, for O.D. in Paradise in 1983, Jessica in 1986 and Alien Creature in 2000.

The production of Maggie and Pierre toured Canada and played off-Broadway in New York, where Griffiths was spotted by indie film-maker John Sayles, who cast her as the lead in his 1983 film Liana, about a married woman who has an affair with a female professor. This won Griffiths the Alliance for Gay Artists Award in Los Angeles.

Had she stayed in America, greater stardom may have beckoned, but Griffiths returned to Canada instead.

More than a dozen plays followed Maggie and Pierre, and in 1997 Griffiths founded her own Duchess Productions, which produced a tour of Alien Creature, as well as developing and associate-producing The Duchess aka Wallis Simpson (1997), Alien Creature: A Visitation from Gwendolyn MacEwen (1999), Chronic (2003) and Age of Arousal (2007).

The latter was the second of Griffiths' British Trilogy of plays, inspired in part by her Rotherham-born father. The first, The Duchess aka Wallis Simpson, looks at the American divorcée whose marriage to King Edward caused him to abdicate. The third, The Last Dog of War (2010), is a solo piece performed by Griffiths over the last few years of her life, and which was inspired by a trip she took with her father as he embarked on a reunion with his old RAF squadron. "There's always an element in my work of fantasy, or what I call fabulism," Griffiths said of the Trilogy, "so in Wallis Simpson, her jewels are personified, and they become characters in the play. There will be that über level that the play goes to. There'll be no thoughtspeak, but there is this other thing that is reached for. So while the three plays are different, I guess they're about me wrestling with my heritage, and bringing my own perspective to it."

With Maria Campbell, Griffiths co-wrote The Book of Jessica and published short stories, while in 1999, Sheer Nerve, a collection of seven of her plays, was published. While Griffiths' final work, Games, was presented in Calgary, her last performance came in Heaven Above, Heaven Below, a sequel to an earlier work, The Darling Family, which was staged at Theatre Passe Muraille, where Maggie and Pierre premiered more than three decades earlier.

Speaking about her Edinburgh production of Age of Arousal after being introduced to the play in Toronto, Romanes recalls how, "I was struck by Linda's fierce intelligence and energy, and her quite wonderful body of work (I read all the plays). She also had very strong desires to write in very different and innovative conventions, which I loved.

"She was a director and actress herself and so understood all aspects of theatre, and her input was invaluable and she inspired us all to take the piece as far as she imagined."