a dead Winston Churchill rising from his catafalque in Westminster Hall. Brenton's play "offered an imaginative vision of a future in which basic human freedoms would be curtailed by the state. As so often, a dramatist saw things that others did not". Brenton's next major success was Weapons of Happiness, about a strike in a south London factory, commissioned by the National Theatre for its new Lyttelton Theatre and the first commissioned play to be performed at its South Bank home. Staged by Hare in July 1976, it won the Evening Standard award for Best Play. He gained notoriety for his play The Romans in Britain, first staged at the National Theatre in October 1980, which drew parallels between the Roman invasion of Britain in 54BC and the British military presence in Northern Ireland. But the politics of his play were ignored. Instead a display of moral outrage focused on a scene of attempted anal rape of a Druid priest (played by Greg Hicks), caught bathing by a Roman centurion (Peter Sproule). This resulted in a private prosecution by Mary Whitehouse against the play's director, Michael Bogdanov. But Whitehouse's prosecution was withdrawn by her own legal team when it became obvious that it would not succeed. The theme of Brenton's 1985 political comedy Pravda, a collaboration with David Hare who also directed, was described by Michael Billington in The Guardian of 3 May 1985 as "the rapacious absorption of chunks of the British press by a tough South African entrepreneur, Lambert Le Roux....superbly embodied by Anthony Hopkins who utters every sentence with precise Afrikaans over-articulation as if the rest of the world are idiots." The target of the satire was generally accepted to be the Australian international newspaper proprietor Rupert Murdoch and his News International empire, but the play's main question mark was about the dangers for society and the state of monopolistic media ownership. Brenton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2017. Personal life He married Jane Margaret Fry in 1970. They have two sons. Works Plays Ladder of Fools, Cambridge University Actors, ADC Theatre, Cambridge (1965) Winter, Daddykins, Lantern Theatre, Dublin (1965) It's My Criminal, Royal Court Theatre (1965) Christie in Love, Portable Theatre, Royal Court Theatre Upstairs (1969) Gum and Goo, Brighton Combination (1969); RSC at the Open Space Theatre (1971) Revenge, Royal Court Theatre Upstairs (1969) Heads, University of Bradford Drama