Friedrich Dürrenmatt was a Swiss author and dramatist. He was a proponent of epic theatre whose plays reflected the recent experiences of World War II. The politically active author's work included avant-garde dramas, philosophical crime novels, and macabre satire. Dürrenmatt was a member of the Gruppe Olten, a group of left-wing Swiss writers who convened regularly at a restaurant in the city of Olten.
Václav Havel was a Czech statesman, author, poet, playwright and dissident. Havel served as the last president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until 1992, prior to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia on 31 December, before he became the first president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. He was the first democratically elected president of either country after the fall of communism. As a writer of Czech literature, he is known for his plays, essays and memoirs.
Charter 77 was an informal civic initiative in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic from 1976 to 1992, named after the document Charter 77 from January 1977. Founding members and architects were Jiří Němec, Václav Benda, Ladislav Hejdánek, Václav Havel, Jan Patočka, Zdeněk Mlynář, Jiří Hájek, Martin Palouš, Pavel Kohout, and Ladislav Lis. Spreading the text of the document was considered a political crime by the Czechoslovak government. After the 1989 Velvet Revolution, many of the members of the initiative played important roles in Czech and Slovak politics.
The Young Vic Theatre is a performing arts venue located on The Cut, near the South Bank, in the London Borough of Lambeth.
Ahmad Saatchian is an Iranian theatre, television, and film actor, as well as a member of the barg group theater
Julia Hills is an English actress, known for portraying the role of Rona in all eight series of the BBC sitcom 2point4 Children. She also portrayed various roles in Channel 4's first late night satirical sketch show Who Dares Wins, Beryl in two series of the sitcom Dad and Caroline Joyner in Casualty.
James Saunders was a prolific English playwright born in Islington, London. His early plays led to him being considered one of the leading British exponents of the Theatre of the Absurd.
Man Equals Man, or A Man's a Man, is a play by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht. One of Brecht's earlier works, it explores themes of war, human fungibility, and identity. One of the agitprop works inspired by the developments in USSR praising the bolshevik collectivism and replaceability of each member of the collective.
Martin Andrew Crimp is a British playwright.
The Orange Tree Theatre is a 180-seat theatre at 1 Clarence Street, Richmond in south-west London, which was built specifically as a theatre in the round. It is housed within a disused 1867 primary school, built in Victorian Gothic style.
Mr Puntila and His Man Matti is an epic comedy by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht. It was written in 1940 and first performed in 1948.
Mahagonny, ein Songspiel, or Mahagonny, a song-play, was written by composer Kurt Weill and dramatist Bertolt Brecht and first performed with that title and description in 1927. Elisabeth Hauptmann contributed the words to two of its songs. Just under half an hour in length, the work can be thought of as a staged or scenic cantata. By the end of 1929, however, Mahagonny had grown into a two-hour opera with the title Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, or Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. This was premiered in March 1930. Today the cantata and the opera are considered separately, the latter holding a place in the repertory, the former being an occasional piece staged in small theaters or programmed as an outgrowth of a song recital when resources permit. For this reason the shorter work is informally referred to as Das kleine Mahagonny, or The Little Mahagonny, or as Mahagonny-Songspiel.
Turandot or the Whitewashers' Congress is an epic comedy by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht. It was written during the summer of 1953 in Buckow and substantially revised in light of a brief period of rehearsals in 1954, though it was still incomplete at the time of Brecht's death in 1956 and did not receive its first production until several years later. It premièred on 5 February 1969 at the Zürich Schauspielhaus, in a production directed by Benno Besson and Horst Sagert, with music by Yehoshua Lakner.
Auriol Smith is an English actress and theatre director. She was a founder member and associate director of the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, London. She co-founded the theatre in 1971 with her husband Sam Walters, who became the United Kingdom's longest-serving artistic director. Walters and Smith stepped down from their posts at the Orange Tree Theatre in June 2014.
Christopher Ravenscroft is an English actor, best known for his recurring role as DI Mike Burden in The Ruth Rendell Mysteries, the ITV adaptation of Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford mysteries.
David Hugh Jones was an English stage, television and film director.
Radovan Lukavský was a Czech theatre and film actor.
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Kurt Weill and began a life-long collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre and the Verfremdungseffekt.
Alfred Néoclès Hennequin was a Belgian playwright, best known for his farces. Born in Liège, Hennequin was trained there as an engineer, and was employed by the national railway company. In his spare time he wrote plays, and in 1870 had a success in Brussels with his farce Les Trois chapeaux. He moved to Paris in 1871 and became a full-time playwright. Between 1871 and 1886 he wrote a series of comic plays, including Le Procès Veauradieux, Les Dominos roses, Bébé and La Femme à papa. Most of his plays were co-written with collaborators including Alfred Delacour and Albert Millaud and, in his last play, his son Maurice.
Michael E. Feingold was an American critic, translator, lyricist, playwright and dramaturg. He was the lead theater critic of The Village Voice from 1982 to 2013, for which he was twice named a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism finalist, and was a two-time recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. He was a judge for the Obie Awards for 31 years, and the chairman for nine years. For his work as the translator and adapter of the book and lyrics of the Kurt Weill, Elisabeth Hauptmann, and Bertolt Brecht musical Happy End, he was nominated for two Tony Awards in 1977.
