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John Arden (26 October 1930 – 28 March 2012) was an English playwright who at his death was lauded as "one of the most significant British playwrights of the late 1950s and early 60s".
Arden was initially associated with the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre in London. His 1959 play, Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, in which four army deserters arrive in a northern mining town to exact retribution for an act of colonial violence, is considered to be his best. His work was influenced by Bertolt Brecht and Epic Theatre as in Left-Handed Liberty (1965, on the anniversary of Magna Carta). Other plays include Live Like Pigs, The Workhouse Donkey, and Armstrong's Last Goodnight, the last of which was performed at the 1965 Chichester Festival by the National Theatre after it was rejected by the Royal Court. In 1964 he joined the Who Killed Kennedy? Committee set up by Bertrand Russell.
His 1978 radio play Pearl was considered in a Guardian survey John Arden's Radio Plays; retrieved 9 October 2009 to be one of the best plays in that medium. He also wrote several novels, including Silence Among the Weapons, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1982, "John Arden" , Man Booker Prize website and Books of Bale, about the Protestant apologist John Bale. He was a member of the Royal Society of Literature.
With his wife and co-writer Margaretta D'Arcy he picketed the RSC premiere of his Arthurian play The Island of the Mighty, because they thought the production was pro-imperialist, and they wrote several plays together which were highly critical of the British presence in Ireland, where he and D'Arcy lived from 1971 onward.
In 1961, he was a founder member of the anti-nuclear Committee of 100, and he also chaired the pacifist weekly Peace News. In Ireland, he was for a while a member of Official Sinn Féin. He was an advocate of civil liberties, and opposed anti-terror legislation, as demonstrated in his 2007 radio play The Scam.
Plays written in collaboration with Margaretta D'Arcy include:
Last years and death
He was elected to Aosdána, an Irish arts academy, in 2011 before dying in Galway in 2012. He was waked in a wicker casket.
Awards
Works
(Selected)
Books
Plays by John Arden
See also
External links
Categories: 1930 Births, 2012 Deaths, Alumni Of King's College, Cambridge, Alumni Of The Edinburgh College Of Art, Aosdána Members, British Expatriates In Ireland, British Anti-war Activists, British Male Dramatists And Playwrights, British Male Novelists, Fellows Of The Royal Society Of Literature, People Educated At Sedbergh School, Writers From Barnsley, 20th-century British Dramatists And Playwrights, 20th-century British Novelists, 20th-century British Male Writers, 20th-century British Writers
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