Howard Brenton is a British playwright and screenwriter well celebrated in the United Kingdom. In the early years of his career, Brenton joined the Brighton Combination as well as the Portable Theatre where he wrote such plays as Christie In Love and Fruit. From there, he continued to write plays Winter, Wesley, How Beautiful With Badges and A Sky Blue-Life among others, all before the age of 30. In 1973, Brenton was commissioned by Richard Eyre to write something “big” for Nottingham Playhouse. This became Brassneck and The Churchill Play, a commentary on the conflict between liberty and security that had a dead Churchill rising from his resting place in Westminster Hall as the opening scene.
Brenton’s next big success, Weapons of Happiness, was commissioned by the National Theatre as the first play to be produced at their new location on the South Bank, where the theatre still stands today. His work The Romans in Britain (once again at the National Theatre) gained traction when a woman named Mary Whitehouse prosecuted the shows director because of a graphic scene depicting an attempted rape of a priest. The prosecution was ultimately withdrawn when it was clear it would not succeed. He wrote 13 episodes for the BBC1 drama Spooks and in 2010, Anne Boleyn played at Shakespear’s Globe and won Best New Play at the WhatsOnStage Theatregoers Choice Awards 2011.
Throughout his career, Howard Brenton wrote many other titles including: Revenge (Theatre Upstairs, 1969); Magnificence (Royal Court Theatre,1973); Bloody Poetry (FocoNovo, 1984, and Royal Court Theatre, 1987); Epsom Downs (Joint Stock Theatre, 1977); Sore Throats (RSC,1978); Thirteenth Night (RSC,1981); The Genius (1983), Greenland (1988) and Berlin Bertie (1992), all presented by the Royal Court; Kit’s Play (RADA Jerwood Theatre, 2000); Paul (National Theatre, 2005); In Extremis (Shakespeare’s Globe, 2006 and 2007); Never So Good (National Theatre, 2008); The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists adapted from the novel by Robert Tressell (Liverpool Everyman and Chichester Festival Theatre, 2010); 55 Days (Hampstead Theatre, 2012); The Guffin (NT Connections, 2013); Drawing the Line (Hampstead Theatre, 2013); Doctor Scroggy's War (Shakespeare's Globe, 2014); Lawrence After Arabia (Hampstead Theatre, 2016); The Blinding Light (Jermyn Street Theatre, 2017), The Shadow Factory (NST City, Southampton, 2018), Jude (Hampstead Theatre, 2019) and Cancelling Socrates (Jermyn Street Theatre, London, 2022).
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