Howard John Brenton FRSL (born 13 December 1942) is an English playwright and screenwriter, often ranked alongside contemporaries such as Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill, and David Hare.
[2] 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.
"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."
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).
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."