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Howard John Brenton FRSL (born 13 December 1942) is an English playwright and screenwriter. While little-known in the United States, he is celebrated in his home country and often ranked alongside contemporaries such as Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill, and David Hare. [1]
Brenton was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, son of policeman (later Methodist minister) Donald Henry Brenton and his wife Rose Lilian (née Lewis). He was educated at Chichester High School For Boys and read English Literature at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. In 1964 he was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal for Poetry. [2] While at Cambridge he wrote a play, Ladder of Fools which was performed at the ADC Theatre as a double bill with "Hello-Goodbye Sebastian" by John Grillo in April 1965, and at the Oxford Playhouse in June of that year. It was described by Eric Shorter of The Daily Telegraph as "Actable, gripping, murky and moody: how often can you say that of the average new play tried out in London, let alone of an undergraduate's work..." [2] Brenton's one-act play, It's My Criminal, was performed at the Royal Court Theatre (1966).
In 1968 he joined the Brighton Combination as a writer and actor, and in 1969 joined Portable Theatre (founded by David Hare and Tony Bicat), for whom he wrote Christie in Love , staged in the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs (1969) and Fruit (1970). He is also the author of Winter, Daddykins (1966), Revenge for the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs; and the triple-bill Heads, Gum & Goo and The Education of Skinny Spew (1969). These were followed by Wesley (1970); Scott of the Antarctic and A Sky-blue Life (1971); Hitler Dances, How Beautiful With Badges, and an adaptation of Measure for Measure (1972).
In 1973 Brenton and David Hare were jointly commissioned by Richard Eyre to write a "big" play for Nottingham Playhouse. "The result was Brassneck, which offered an exhilaratingly panoramic satire on England from 1945 to the present, depicting the meteoric ups and downs of a self-seeking Midlands family...from singing the Red Flag in 1945 to acting as a conduit for the Oriental drug market in the decadent Seventies." – Michael Billington (2007). [3] Brassneck was followed a year later by Brenton's The Churchill Play , again staged by Richard Eyre at the Nottingham Playhouse (1974), another 'state of the nation play' about the growing conflict between security and liberty, opening with the image of a dead Winston Churchill rising from his catafalque in Westminster Hall. Brenton's play "offered an imaginative vision of a future in which basic human freedoms would be curtailed by the state. As so often, a dramatist saw things that others did not". [3]
Brenton's next major success was Weapons of Happiness , about a strike in a south London factory, commissioned by the National Theatre for its new Lyttelton Theatre and the first commissioned play to be performed at its South Bank home. [4] Staged by Hare in July 1976, it won the Evening Standard award for Best Play.
He gained notoriety for his play The Romans in Britain , first staged at the National Theatre in October 1980, which drew parallels between the Roman invasion of Britain in 54BC and the British military presence in Northern Ireland. But the politics of his play were ignored. Instead a display of moral outrage focused on a scene of attempted anal rape of a Druid priest (played by Greg Hicks), caught bathing by a Roman centurion (Peter Sproule). This resulted in a private prosecution by Mary Whitehouse against the play's director, Michael Bogdanov. But Whitehouse's prosecution was withdrawn by her own legal team when it became obvious that it would not succeed.
The theme of Brenton's 1985 political comedy Pravda, a collaboration with David Hare who also directed, was described by Michael Billington in The Guardian of 3 May 1985 as "the rapacious absorption of chunks of the British press by a tough South African entrepreneur, Lambert Le Roux....superbly embodied by Anthony Hopkins who utters every sentence with precise Afrikaans over-articulation as if the rest of the world are idiots." The target of the satire was generally accepted to be the Australian international newspaper proprietor Rupert Murdoch and his News International empire, but the play's main question mark was about the dangers for society and the state of monopolistic media ownership.
Brenton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2017. [5] [6]
He married Jane Margaret Fry in 1970. They have two sons. [7]
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Sir David Hare is an English playwright, screenwriter and theatre and film director. Best known for his stage work, Hare has also enjoyed great success with films, receiving two Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay for writing The Hoursin 2002, based on the novel written by Michael Cunningham, and The Readerin 2008, based on the novel of the same name written by Bernhard Schlink.
Stephen Lowe is an English playwright and director.
The Romans in Britain is a 1980 stage play by Howard Brenton that comments upon imperialism and the abuse of power. It was the subject of a private prosecution brought by the conservative moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse for gross indecency.
Lynn Farleigh is an English actress of stage and screen.
The Joint Stock Theatre Company was founded in London 1974 by David Hare, Max Stafford-Clark Paul Kember and David Aukin. The director William Gaskill was also part of the company. It was primarily a company which presented new plays.
Simon Coates is a British actor who has worked extensively with the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, with whom he has appeared internationally, working with directors such as Sir Richard Eyre, Robert Lepage, Howard Davies, William Gaskill, Sir David Hare, Declan Donnellan, Tim Supple, Sir Tom Stoppard, David Farr, Lindsay Posner, Sean Holmes, Katie Mitchell, Indhu Rubasingham, Phyllida Lloyd, Thea Sharrock, Dame Vanessa Redgrave, Sir Trevor Nunn, Robert Icke, Simon Godwin, James Dacre, Rupert Goold, Gregory Doran, Blanche McIntyre and Sir Michael Boyd.
Maxwell Robert Guthrie Stewart "Max" Stafford-Clark is a British theatre director.
Portable Theatre Company was a writer-led company that toured alternative arts venues in the UK between 1968 -1973. Their aim was to present original and provocative new writing that challenged the staid mediocrity of mainstream theatre.
Magnificence is a 1973 play by English playwright Howard Brenton. It premiered at the Royal Court Theatre and was next performed on the London stage in 2016, at the Finborough Theatre.
William Dudley is a British theatre designer.
Christie in Love is an early play by Howard Brenton concerning the life of serial killer John Christie, who murdered at least seven women between 1943 and 1953, after which he was caught, tried and hanged.
Weapons of Happiness is a 1976 political play by Howard Brenton, about a strike in a London crisp factory. The play makes use of a dramatic conceit whereby the Czech communist cabinet minister Josef Frank is imagined alive in the 1970s, and his hallucinations of life in Stalinist Czechoslovakia interweave with the main plot.
The Churchill Play is a play by Howard Brenton. Written in 1974, the play offers a dystopian picture of an authoritarian England ten years in the future and is set in an internment camp named after Winston Churchill. The play of the title is actually a play within a play, one put on by inmates of the camp, in which soldiers stand guard over Churchill's catafalque, only for him to rise from the dead.
Epsom Downs is a 1977 play by Howard Brenton. Taking its name from the racecourse at which it is set, the play presents a panorama of race-goers, horse-owners, bookies, jockeys, etc. on Derby Day 1977, giving it the feel of a modern city comedy.
Bloody Poetry is a 1984 play by Howard Brenton centring on the lives of Percy Shelley and his circle.
Winsome Pinnock FRSL is a British playwright of Jamaican heritage, who is "probably Britain's most well known black female playwright". She was described in The Guardian as "the godmother of black British playwrights".
Nick Grosso is a British playwright, born in London in 1968 to Argentine parents of Italian and Russian extraction. His style has been described as that of a "latter-day Oscar Wilde on speed" by Sheridan Morley.
The Judas Kiss is a 1998 play by David Hare about Oscar Wilde's scandal and disgrace at the hands of his young lover Bosie.
Drawing the Line is a 2013 play by Howard Brenton, centred on Cyril Radcliffe and his part in the partition of India in 1947. It premiered from 3 December 2013 to 11 January 2014, in a production directed by Howard Davies at London's Hampstead Theatre.
David Hare is an English playwright.
