Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1998 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a playwright. His father was a policeman who became a Methodist minister,

but he went straight into the theatre after leaving Cambridge.

His work is epic and controversial.

One of his early plays, Brass Neck,

was a collaboration with David Hare about corruption in local politics.

In magnificence, he criticized Tory high politics.

The Romans in Britain caused Mary White House to prosecute

for procuring the cast to commit immoral acts. And another play of his, a short sharp shock,

had the Minister for the Arts Norman Singe and

Stevis apologizing to the House of Commons because a state

subsidized theatre had put it on.

The author of all of this nevertheless believes that

theater should be fun. I'm a playwright and a showman, he says, and I think in images

that are never quite rational. He is Howard Brenton. So

theater is primarily an entertainment, is it it Howard not a soapbox?

Oh yes it's an entertainment I think it's a kind of exorcism.

We're trying to get rid of demons.

I mean the Greeks believed it was part of public health. But you said in the early days

when you were just making your reputation you said I would very much like to change the world

with my plays.

...