John McGrath (playwright)

From an Irish Catholic background, McGrath was born in Birkenhead, and educated in Mold and, after his National Service, at St John's College, Oxford.

His play Soft Or A Girl was performed at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre in the early 1970s with great success.l, including in the cast the actor Alison Steadman.

It utilizes some of the dramaturgical and theatrical techniques of epic theatre – actors take on multiple roles and frequently slip out of character – of the type associated with the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, but which McGrath argued have a genealogy that stretches far further back through the history of popular traditions of performance.

These changes are identified as forming a recurrent pattern of abuse of the land and the exploitation of the people by outsiders and by wealthier locals.

[3] In 1962 he had married Elizabeth MacLennan, the Scottish actress, whom he had met while they were both at Oxford University; the couple had two sons and a daughter.