20 February 2006
Monday 20 February 2006 21:30-22:15 (Radio 3)
In an extended interview, Philip Dodd talks to the playwright Howard Brenton about the new revival of his play The Romans in Britain , his latest acclaimed play, Paul , and his relationship with belief.
Programme Details
In tonight's Night Waves, Philip Dodd talks to the playwright Howard Brenton about his life and work. Alongside David Hare and David Edgar, Brenton was one of a generation of young playwrights who burst onto the British theatre scene in the nineteen seventies, fusing the energy of the fringe and the radicalism of the late Sixties with a desire to create big, sweeping plays in the style of the Jacobean playwrights. His career flourished in the Seventies and Eighties with 'state of the nation' plays for the Royal Court, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, including The Churchill Play, which imagined a political prison camp in a near-future England, and The Romans in Britain, which wove together the Roman and Saxon invasions of southern England with the British Army's presence in Northern Ireland. The play provoked much passion, both from its critics, not least Mary Whitehouse, who began an abortive prosecution, and from its champions.
With the first major revival of The Romans in Britain now onstage in Sheffield, a prolonged stint writing for the BBC1 spy drama Spooks, a new play, Paul, recently at the National Theatre and another new work at Shakespeare's Globe this summer, there is now a major resurgence of interest in Brenton's work. On tonight's Night Waves, Philip Dodd asks Howard Brenton about the undercurrents running through his work - his fascination with war and occupation, and with belief - along with the morality of being an entertainer, the inspiration that led to his desire to write tragedies, and his sense of a submerged radical Englishness.
That's Night Waves, on tonight at 9.30, here on Radio 3.
Presenter: Philip Dodd
Producer: Phil Tinline
