Bryony Lavery

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Bryony Lavery (born 1947) is a prolific British dramatist who has written over 100 plays, with some counts putting it as high as 130. Known for her successful and award-winning 1998 play Frozen. In addition to her work in theatre, she has also written for television and radio. She has written books including the biography Tallulah Bankhead and The Woman Writer's Handbook. She taught playwriting at the University of Birmingham.

Lavery grew up in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.[1]

Having begun her career as an actress, she decided that she wanted to write plays with better parts for women.[citation needed] Early in her career she founded a theatre company called Les Oeufs Malades (The Bad Eggs) with actors Gerard Bell and Jessica Higgs. She also founded Female Trouble, More Female Trouble, and served as artistic director of Gay Sweatshop.

Her plays have a feminist undertone.[2] She has written such plays as More Light, which has only one male speaking role, with almost entirely female casts. By 2002, she had written more than twenty plays.[3] Later counts have put this number as high as 110 (see Complete List of Works), exceeding that of her contemporary Alan Ayckbourn. Including unproduced and spec work, this could go as high as 130 plays.

Lavery was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002.[4]

In addition, she has written translations of such works as Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.[5] In addition to this, she has also translated Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, twice, as well as Jourko Tourkka's Cherished Disappointments in Love.

She has written five plays for the National Theatre Connections series. Her successful Frozen triggered a controversy and discussion about artistic sources and plagiarism. It was the subject of a piece by Malcolm Gladwell published in The New Yorker and collected in his book What the Dog Saw.

She adapted Treasure Island, the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, as a play which was first performed on the Olivier Stage of the National Theatre, London, on 3 December 2014, directed by Polly Findlay.[6]

Over the COVID-19 pandemic, she wrote 'about twenty things... on spec' [7]. To date, none have been performed. This would put her total for plays as high as 130.

In the years since, she has written adaptations of The Lovely Bones, Swallows and Amazons, Brideshead Revisited, The Midnight Gang, Oliver Twist, The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage, Sputnik Sweetheart and Midnight Cowboy, for a range of prestige theatres such as the Arcola and Southwark Playhouse, and for directors such as Melly Still and Nicholas Hytner.

She was married to a man until her early thirties. Since that period, Lavery has identified as gay.[1]

Selected works

  • The Two Marias (1988) – Theatre Centre
  • Her Aching Heart (1992)
  • Peter Pan (1991) – a pantomime
  • Goliath (1997)
  • More Light (1997) – National Theatre Connections
  • Frozen (1998)
  • The Magic Toyshop (2001)
  • A Wedding Story (2000)
  • Illyria (2002) – NT Connections
  • Last Easter (2004)
  • Stockholm (2007) – Frantic Assembly
  • Red Sky (2007, play) – NT Connections
  • It Snows (2008, play) – NT Connections
  • Breathing Underwater (1998 radio play) – BBC Radio 7
  • Kursk (2009, play) – Young Vic
  • Beautiful Burnout (2010) – Frantic Assembly / National Theatre of Scotland
  • Dirt (2012, play) – Studio Theatre
  • The Believers (2014, play) – Tricycle Theatre

Stage adaptations

Complete List of Plays

References

External links

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