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Howard John BrentonFRSL (born 13 December 1942) is an English playwright and screenwriter, often ranked alongside contemporaries such asEdward Bond,Caryl Churchill, andDavid Hare.[1]
Brenton was born inPortsmouth,Hampshire, son of policeman (later Methodist minister) Donald Henry Brenton and his wife Rose Lilian (née Lewis). He was educated atChichester High School For Boys and read English Literature atSt Catharine's College, Cambridge. In 1964 he was awarded theChancellor's Gold Medal for Poetry.[2] While at Cambridge he wrote a play,Ladder of Fools which was performed at theADC Theatre as a double bill withHello-Goodbye Sebastian byJohn Grillo in April 1965, and at theOxford Playhouse in June of that year. It was described by Eric Shorter ofThe 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 theRoyal Court Theatre (1966).
In 1968 he joined theBrighton Combination as a writer and actor, and in 1969 joinedPortable Theatre (founded byDavid Hare andTony Bicat), for whom he wroteChristie in Love, staged in the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs (1969) andFruit (1970). He is also the author ofWinter, Daddykins (1966),Revenge for the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs; and the triple-billHeads,Gum & Goo andThe Education of Skinny Spew (1969). These were followed byWesley (1970);Scott of the Antarctic andA Sky-blue Life (1971);Hitler Dances,How Beautiful With Badges, and an adaptation ofMeasure for Measure (1972).
In 1973 Brenton and David Hare were jointly commissioned byRichard Eyre to write a "big" play forNottingham Playhouse. "The result wasBrassneck, 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'sThe 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 deadWinston Churchill rising from his catafalque in Westminster Hall. Brenton's play "offered an imaginative vision of a future in which basic humanfreedoms would be curtailed by the state. As so often, a dramatist saw things that others did not".[3]
Brenton's next major success wasWeapons 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 theEvening Standard award for Best Play.
He gained notoriety for his playThe Romans in Britain, first staged at theNational 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 byGreg Hicks), caught bathing by a Roman centurion (Peter Sproule). This resulted in a private prosecution byMary Whitehouse against the play's directorMichael Bogdanov. 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 comedyPravda, a collaboration with David Hare who also directed, was described byMichael Billington inThe 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 byAnthony 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 proprietorRupert Murdoch and hisNews 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 aFellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2017.[5][6]
He married Jane Margaret Fry in 1970. They have two sons.[7]
Plays[edit]
Libretto[edit]
Radio[edit]
Screenplays[edit]
Books[edit]
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