Last week, I was told that Peter Cheeseman, theatre director, visionary and agitator, had passed away. I'm really sad that I won't be able to talk with him again. I know that there will be many people who are affected by this sad news, least of all his family; Romy, Kate, Betsy and Chloe. I'm also certain that there will be many, many stories from many people about how Peter influenced their lives. Lots of stories about how he influenced whole generations of theatre makers. How he developed a real engagement with the community of the New Vic theatre in Stoke. I'd like to share my personal Peter story in tribute to a man who I believe made a difference to me, to his community and to theatre making.

As chair of the NCDT National Council for Drama Training, Peter, the passionate pioneer of theatre-in-the-round and documentary theatre was instrumental in pushing forward the development and implementation of the MFA in Theatre Directing at Birkbeck college, University of London, the course that I trained on.

This was how I first met Peter, in 2004, in my interviews for Birkbeck. He was a bit intimidating when I first met him. I was 22 and in nervous interview-mode. He was forthright and definitely had a lot of his own opinions to share about my proposed vision for how I would direct the Chekhov play I had to talk about. I wore a big hat to my interviews and Peter always remembered that. Throughout my 2 years in training, he was a committed supporter of our cohort and the course overall, which at that time, was very new (we were only the second ever year of his course). He attended our sessions, our (scary) end of unit presentations and demonstrated real passion for our development as professional artists. After I graduated, he continued to be involved in the course he helped establish, always supportive and always vehemently concerned that directors should have quality skills-development training on a course - if actors and designers could access such quality experiences, then he believed, so should directors.

We stayed in contact through email and I would see him at occasional events. He always remembered my hat, would jokingly ask where it was and then we would have a really in-depth discussion/debate about the staging of a production or the canon of Arthur Miller or whether some plays should just be staged in black box theatres. He seemed a very politicised director though what I really admired was how in both his productions and his speech he made "political" drama the easy bedfellow of "populist" theatre. One of the last times I saw him, I was on the tube with Peter and his wife Romy. The way our conversation went, I remember being very much in awe that I could sit on the underground and hear stories from someone who had achieved so much in theatre, who was a force to be reckoned with, who fought when he believed in something and who was so very interested in developing younger talent.

I have a photograph of our MFA Birkbeck graduation. Lots of smiling and arms-around-shoulders from the small group of directors, with Peter in front, blocking the face of our tutor, Rob Swain. He had made a joke about how I had swapped my hat for a mortarboard. I'm sure there's a photo from another angle where you can see Rob's face but the photo I have makes me laugh. It's a wonderful reminder of part of a journey that Peter Cheeseman helped send me on and I'm really thankful.