John Arden
born Oct. 26, 1930, Barnsley, Yorkshire, Eng.
one of the most important of the British
playwrights to emerge in the mid-20th
century. His plays mix poetry and songs with
colloquial speech in a boldly theatrical
manner and involve strong conflicts
purposely left unresolved.
Arden grew up in the industrial town of
Barnsley, the character of which he captured
in his play The Workhouse Donkey (1963). He
studied architecture at the University of
Cambridge and at Edinburgh College of Art,
where fellow students performed his comedy
All Fall Down (1955), about the construction
of a railway. He continued to write plays
while working as an architectural assistant
from 1955 to 1957. His first play to be
produced professionally was a radio drama,
The Life of Man (1956). Waters of Babylon
(1957), a play with a roguish but unjudged
central character, revealed a moral
ambiguity that troubled critics and
audiences. His next play, Live Like Pigs
(1958), was set on a housing estate. This
was followed by his best-known work,
Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance (1959), set in a
colliery town in 1860–80. Both plays caused
controversy.
In 1957 Arden married Margaretta D’Arcy,
an actress and playwright, with whom he
wrote a number of stage pieces and
improvisational works for amateur and
student players. The Happy Haven, produced
in 1960 in London, is a sardonic farce about
an old people’s home. The Workhouse Donkey
is a crowded, exuberant, and comic drama of
municipal politics. Armstrong’s Last
Goodnight (1964) is a drama set in the
Borders region of Scotland in the 1530s and
written in Lowland Scottish vernacular.
Left-Handed Liberty (1965), written to mark
the 750th anniversary of the signing of
Magna Carta, characteristically dwells on
the failure of the document to achieve
liberty. His writing became more politically
committed, as evidenced in the two radio
plays The Bagman (1972) and Pearl (1978).
Later plays—The Non-Stop Connolly Cycle
(1975), a six-part drama based on the life
of the Irish patriot James Connolly, as well
as the Arthurian drama The Island of the
Mighty (1972), Vandaleur’s Folly (1978), and
The Little Gray Home in the West (1982),
among others—were written with D’Arcy.
Arden’s fiction includes the novel Silence
Among the Weapons (1982; also published as
Vox Pop) and the story collection The
Stealing Steps (2003).
