Howard John Brenton FRSL (born 13 December 1942) is an English playwright and screenwriter. While little-known in the United States, he is celebrated in his home country and often ranked alongside contemporaries such as Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill, and David Hare. Early years Brenton was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, son of policeman (later Methodist minister) Donald Henry Brenton and his wife Rose Lilian (née Lewis). He was educated at Chichester High School For Boys and read English Literature at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. In 1964 he was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal for Poetry. While at Cambridge he wrote a play, Ladder of Fools which was performed at the ADC Theatre as a double bill with "Hello-Goodbye Sebastian" by John Grillo in April 1965, and at the Oxford Playhouse in June of that year. It was described by Eric Shorter of The Daily Telegraph as "Actable, gripping, murky and moody: how often can you say that of the average new play tried out in London, let alone of an undergraduate's work..." Brenton's one-act play, It's My Criminal, was performed at the Royal Court Theatre (1966). Career In 1968 he joined the Brighton Combination as a writer and actor, and in 1969 joined Portable Theatre (founded by David Hare and Tony Bicat), for whom he wrote Christie in Love, staged in the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs (1969) and Fruit (1970). He is also the author of Winter, Daddykins (1966), Revenge for the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs; and the triple-bill Heads, Gum & Goo and The Education of Skinny Spew (1969). These were followed by Wesley (1970); Scott of the Antarctic and A Sky-blue Life (1971); Hitler Dances, How Beautiful With Badges, and an adaptation of Measure for Measure (1972). In 1973 Brenton and David Hare were jointly commissioned by Richard Eyre to write a "big" play for Nottingham Playhouse. "The result was Brassneck, which offered an exhilaratingly panoramic satire on England from 1945 to the present, depicting the meteoric ups and downs of a self-seeking Midlands family...from singing the Red Flag in 1945 to acting as a conduit for the Oriental drug market in the decadent Seventies." – Michael Billington (2007). Brassneck was followed a year later by Brenton's The Churchill Play, again staged by Richard Eyre at the Nottingham Playhouse (1974), another 'state of the nation play' about the growing conflict between security and liberty, opening with the image of