Playwright who wrote about apartheid and homosexuality
DONALD HOWARTH, who has died aged 88, was the last of the “angry young men” who revolutionised British theatre at the Royal Court in the late 1950s.
He was a gentle revolutionary, his plays tackling once provocative subjects with humanity and guts, from mixed-race relationships to homosexual love. He also championed future trailblazers including Hanif Kureshi, promoted international voices to the London stage and made confrontational theatrical stances against apartheid.
Donald Alfred Howarth was born in Woolwich on November 5 1931. His mother, a maid at a school, and father, a soldier, became estranged and he was brought up by an aunt; for many years Howarth thought his mother was simply a door-to-door toy seller.
A maths teacher at Grange High School for Boys in Bradford cast him as Olivia in Twelfth Night; he won at place at Esme Church’s Northern Theatre School, and from there went to Dundee Rep, where he once persuaded the director of a murder mystery not to let the cast read the ending until just before the production opened.
Although he was not much of an actor, rep taught him the rights and wrongs of writing dialogue and helped him to understand what he called “the literature of talking”.
After a spell as a merchant seaman, which he endured by studying the dialogue of his crew mates, he wrote Sugar in the Morning (1959), the story of a lonely landlady electrified by a new tenant. The prosaic setting, unsentimental affection and sharp wit were blended boldly with a Greek chorus-type character who addresses the audience throughout.
His next effort, All Good Children (1960) was an ecclesiastical tale with an incestuous undertow. Its sequel, the witty and more stylised A Lily in Little India (1962), saw the West End debut of Ian Mckellen.
Three Months Gone (1970) starred a vampish Diana Dors, her faded glamour and gutsy stage presence stunning sceptical critics and proving Howarth’s great instinct for casting. However, although female characters were commendably plentiful in his work, they were often drawn in broad strokes.
A censorious ITV production of Sugar in the Morning unforgivably reinvented a black character as white, effectively castrating the story, but “Scarborough” for the BBC’S Thirty-minute Theatre (1972), a concupiscent reimagining of Adam and Eve climaxing in a threesome, managed a televisual first in its remarkably direct depiction of polyamory.
It is possibly his finest work, and certainly his starkest, a tender, tortured piece that blends sexual frankness with spiritual innocence.
Rather than boycott South Africa over apartheid, Howarth attacked it with Othello Slegs Blankes (“Othello Whites Only”), for The Space in Cape Town in 1975, a risky enterprise that worked splendidly. His internationally acclaimed production of Waiting for Godot (1980) became a grim metaphor for the political situation and the fading hope of change; the production is still considered by many as one of the most important ever staged of the play.
His time as literary manager at the Royal Court saw more ethnically diverse work, such as the acclaimed South African season of 1973, and Mustapha Matura’s Play Mas (1975) and Rum and Coca Cola (1976), and Yemi Ajibade’s Parcel Post (1976), all three of which he directed with sympathy and style.
Despite his slender frame and coquettish demeanour, Howarth was hardy and doughty; he kept his first bout of cancer a secret, driving himself to the hospital on his motorscooter for chemotherapy. He cheerfully dug his own grave in the garden of his cottage in Wales, where he was buried beside his partner of 46 years, the sociologist George Goetschius, who died in 2006.