Howard Brenton: theatre and the politics of power

Howard Brenton has made British political history a subject for the stage: not as a settled sequence of events, but as a contest over power, liberty and the stories a country tells about itself. In plays ranging from the early, provocative Christie in Love to The Romans in Britain and Never So Good, he has placed contentious subjects before audiences and tested what theatre can say about the present by looking at the past.

From Portsmouth to the theatre

Brenton was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, on 13 December 1942. His father, Donald Henry Brenton, was a policeman who later became a Methodist minister; his mother was Rose Lilian, née Lewis. He attended Chichester High School for Boys and studied English Literature at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. In 1964 he received the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

At Cambridge, he wrote Ladder of Fools, performed at the ADC Theatre in April 1965 and later at the Oxford Playhouse. His one-act play It’s My Criminal was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in 1966. These early productions preceded a rapid move into experimental and collaborative theatre. In 1968, Brenton joined the Brighton Combination as a writer and actor; the following year, he joined Portable Theatre, founded by David Hare and Tony Bicat.

For Portable Theatre, Brenton wrote Christie in Love, staged at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs in 1969, and Fruit, performed in 1970. The work established an early pattern: plays that did not avoid uncomfortable subjects. His subsequent writing included Wesley, Scott of the Antarctic and Hitler Dances. The growing range of those projects placed him among a generation of dramatists working across independent companies and established theatres.

Writing the state of the nation

Brenton’s collaboration with David Hare produced Brassneck, commissioned for Nottingham Playhouse and first staged there in 1973. Its satire followed an ambitious Midlands family across the post-war decades. The partnership also anticipated a recurring concern in Brenton’s work: the relationship between private advancement and larger systems of power.

The Churchill Play, staged at Nottingham Playhouse in 1974, turned directly to the boundary between security and liberty. Its imagined future of curtailed freedoms began with the striking image of Winston Churchill rising from his catafalque in Westminster Hall. In 1976, the National Theatre commissioned Weapons of Happiness for its new Lyttelton Theatre. The play, about a strike in a south London factory, was the first commissioned play to be performed at the National’s South Bank home and won the Evening Standard award for Best Play.

Brenton continued to work with other writers. Deeds, staged in 1978, was made with Trevor Griffiths, Ken Campbell and Hare. In 1985, Brenton and Hare collaborated again on Pravda, a National Theatre satire about the absorption of British newspapers by a powerful proprietor. The play won the Evening Standard award for Best Play. Across these works, political subjects were not confined to government: workplaces, press ownership and the state’s reach all became material for drama.

The Romans in Britain: history on trial

First staged at the National Theatre in October 1980, The Romans in Britain set the Roman invasion of Britain alongside the British military presence in Northern Ireland. The parallel histories invited audiences to consider occupation and military power across very different periods. The play’s political comparison, however, was overtaken in public controversy by a scene involving the attempted rape of a Druid priest.

Mary Whitehouse brought a private prosecution against the play’s director, Michael Bogdanov. The prosecution was withdrawn by Whitehouse’s legal team when it became apparent that it would not succeed. The episode made the production a flashpoint in arguments about obscenity, censorship and the limits of theatrical expression. It is more accurate to describe a prosecution that was withdrawn than to suggest that the play’s staging resulted in a completed obscenity trial.

Brenton’s later work continued to range across history and contemporary politics. In 2008, the National Theatre staged Never So Good, his play about Harold Macmillan, Conservative Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963. By framing Macmillan’s career against Britain’s changing place in the world, the play made political leadership and national change subjects for theatrical examination. Other later works included Anne Boleyn, staged at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2010, and 55 Days, produced at Hampstead Theatre in 2012.

A career across forms

Brenton’s work has extended beyond plays written for the stage. He has written screenplays, including Desert of Lies for the BBC’s Play for Today, and worked on the BBC drama series Spooks, writing fourteen episodes. He also wrote the novel Diving for Pearls and published Hot Irons, a collection of diaries, essays and journalism. In 1994, he wrote the libretto for Playing Away, a football opera produced by Opera North and the Munich Biennale.

His theatre writing has included adaptations and translations as well as original plays. Among them are translations of Bertolt Brecht’s The Life of Galileo and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, and an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. His work with writers including Hare, Tariq Ali and others formed part of a career built through partnerships as well as individual authorship. In 2017, Brenton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Why Howard Brenton deserves a place in British Legacy

Brenton’s place in British Legacy rests on the specificity of his contribution to British theatre. Weapons of Happiness made a south London factory strike the subject of a National Theatre commission and was the first commissioned play staged at the National’s South Bank home. The Churchill Play turned the prospect of restricted freedoms into a theatrical warning, while The Romans in Britain brought the Roman invasion and the British military presence in Northern Ireland into a deliberately challenging comparison. These works show a playwright using the stage to examine how authority is exercised and how political events are remembered.

His achievement also lies in the breadth and continuity of that engagement. Brassneck and Pravda, both written with David Hare, took satire to questions of social ambition and press ownership; Never So Good revisited post-war political leadership through Harold Macmillan. Brenton’s writing across theatre, screen, radio, opera and prose carried those interests into different forms, while his collaborations linked him to a wider British theatrical culture. The controversy around The Romans in Britain also made the boundaries of performance and censorship a public question, even though the prosecution against its director was withdrawn. His legacy is not a claim that one writer settled those debates. It is the record of a sustained body of work that put difficult questions about power, liberty and national history before British audiences.

Sources

Howard Brenton — Wikipedia revision 1378536099 · Howard Brenton — Wikipedia

Adapted in part from Howard Brenton by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.