Howard Brenton

Through the story of a single family, Brassneck traces a history that parallels the Labour Party's advent to power in 1945 through to the property speculation of the 1960s and the disillusionment with the Labour government in the early 1970s. Like most of the early work of the writers, David Hare and Howard Brenton, committed radical (if not revolutionary) socialists throughout the 1970s, it is a satirical attack on capitalist greed and corruption, full of savage, and often disturbing, humour.

Nobody enjoys being in debt, financial or otherwise, but August Strindberg’s 1888 play – which the author ranked as his finest achievement – plays with masterly skill on the themes of emotional debit and credit to create a situation as painfully enjoyable for the audience as it is nightmarish for the protagonists.

London, 1947. Summoned by the Prime Minister from the Court where he is presiding judge, Cyril Radcliffe is given an unlikely mission. He is to travel to India, a country he has never visited, and, with limited survey information, no expert support and no knowledge of cartography, he is to draw the border which will divide the Indian sub-continent into two new Sovereign Dominions. To make matters even more challenging, he has only six weeks to complete the task. Wholly unsuited to his role, Radcliffe is unprepared for the dangerous whirlpool of political intrigue and passion into which he is plunged – untold consequences may even result from the illicit liaison between the Leader of the Congress Party and the Viceroy’s wife… As he begins to break under the pressure he comes to realise that he holds in his hands the fate of millions of people.

Howard Brenton's play, written for television, examines terrorism and the state's complex relationship with it and language surrounding it.

Johnny has joined the army because he likes canoeing, but ends up in a war-torn city and is compromised into helping the enemy. However, desertion will not be a solution, and he finds himself more distressed than ever.

The fortunes of two expeditions a century and a half apart become mysteriously linked in the same desolate stretch of Kalahari Desert. In 1848 the Broon family are sent by the London Missionary Society to look for and convert a legendary race of strangely deformed savages. In 1983, a team of three people go off in search of what really happened.

On 3 April 2011, as he was boarding a flight to Taipei, the Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei was arrested at Beijing Airport. Advised merely that his travel “could damage state security”, he was escorted to a van by officials after which he disappeared for 81 days. On his release, the government claimed that his imprisonment related to tax evasion.

A Channel Four special presentation of the Royal Court Theatre 1989 production, London. with Paul Bhattacharjee, Nabil Shaban and Fiona Victory. "Iranian Nights" was a play written and produced as a direct response by writers and artists to the notorious Feb 14 1989 Fatwa (a sentence of death) from Iran's leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, placed on Salman Rushdie for his novel "The Satanic Verses", regarded by fundamentalist Muslims as blasphemous.