Stephen Jeffreys

British playwright who scored an international hit with The Libertine

Stephen Jeffreys, playwright. Born: 22 April, 1950, in London. Died: 17 September 2018 in London, aged 68.

Stephen Jeffreys, a British playwright who looked to the past for some of his bestknown works, notably The Libertine, about a hedonistic 17th-century earl, which was a vehicle for both John Malkovich and Johnny Depp, has died. He was 68. The cause was a brain tumour, his agents said.

Among Jeffreys’ works were a play, Lost Land, about ethnic tension in Hungary during the First World War; an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times made to be performed by four actors; and the screenplay for the 2013 film Diana, starring Naomi Watts as the Princess of Wales.

For The Libertine, an eyebrow-raising work that had its premiere in 1994 at the University of Warwick and then moved to the Royal Court Theatre in London, he drew on the life of John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, who was a writer known for his pleasureseeking ways. In an interview with the Chicago Sun-times in 1996, when The Libertine had its US premiere at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago in a production starring Malkovich, Jeffreys credited his dentist for his interest in the saucy subject.

“The man had a daughter who was about 13 at the time, and he realised she was growing very curious about the books in his library,” Jeffreys said. “So he decided to give away the most lascivious volumes.”

He gave Jeffreys Sodom, a play sometimes attributed to Wilmot, though its authorship remains in dispute. Jeffreys said he found it to be “one of the raciest and rudest things I’d ever read”. That led him to learn more about the earl, and The Libertine (which in 2004 was made into a film starring Depp) was the eventual result.

“This is a fascinating reading of Rochester’s life,” John Peter wrote in the Sunday Times of the play’s 1994 premiere. “Jeffreys has done his homework. All the main episodes are true, and all the verses, including the obscene ones, are Rochester’s own.”

Beyond his own writing, Jeffreys was also much admired for helping along the careers of other playwrights. Some took classes from him; his sessions on dramatic structure were particularly prized. Others benefited from his many years as a literary associate at the Royal Court, a job in which he read new plays and recommended some for production.

Playwright Joe Penhall was one; Jeffreys championed his 1995 play Pale Horse. Penhall wrote a tribute to Jeffreys this week in the Guardian, noting that he had visited him recently in hospice care. “He smiled gently and it was hard to make out what he was saying,” Penhall wrote. “As a writer it was never hard – he had a directness like a good handshake.”

Jeffreys was born in 1950 in London. His family was in the business of making billiard tables, an occupation he would turn into the subject of a 1993 play, A Going Concern.

He graduated from Southampton University in 1972 with a degree in English literature. In 1975, he started working at the Royal Court as – to use his description from a brief oral history – “an assistant assistant electrician in the theatre upstairs”.

“I was just moving chairs around and occasionally being asked to plug in a lantern, as they were called then,” he recalled.

At about the same time he began writing plays, a number of them for Pocket Theatre Cumbria, a small troupe of which he was a founder. His 1982 adaptation of Hard Times, with four actors (sometimes expanded to five in later productions) playing multiple roles, proved especially popular.

It was staged all over England and had its US premiere at the Gloucester Stage Company in Massachusetts in 1986.

“The Libertine” brought him a new level of attention. In the oral history, recorded for the Court, he recalled a moment after the play had begun previews at that theatre and started generating buzz. He was coming out of a script meeting, he said, and could not open a door leading to the theatre’s stairway.

“I kept pushing it and wondering, ‘What’s wrong with this door?’ ” he said. “And I pushed a bit further and there was someone sitting there” – the queue of people waiting to get into his play was blocking the doorway.

For the American premiere in 1996, Steppenwolf lured back one of its earliest actors, Malkovich, to play Rochester.

Reviewing the production in the Sun-times, Hedy Weiss called it “enthralling” and added: “Given the play’s title, you also might expect it to be appalling. But British dramatist Stephen Jeffreys’ work is so rigorous in its emotional truth, so complex in its intellectual arguments, and so comical when comedy is the only fallback position, that nothing (including simulated shagging and a dildo dance) seems gratuitous.”

Eight years later, Malkovich was also in the film version, but this time in the role of Charles II, with Depp as Rochester. Jeffreys adapted his play for the movie.

Jeffreys was back at Steppenwolf in 2005 with Lost Land, which he wrote for Malkovich. The play involves Hungarian geopolitics and a particular type of dessert wine favoured by powerful people. To research it, he said, “I visited Hungary, toured some castles and drank a lot of good wine.”

Among his other works were Backbeat, a stage version of Iain Softley’s 1994 movie about the early days of the Beatles, which he adapted with Softley. It had its premiere in 2010 at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre.

Jeffreys is survived by his wife, Annabel Arden, and two sons, Jack and Ralph.

In an interview for the recent book Dramatic Writing Masterclasses: Key Advice From the Industry Masters, Jeffreys was asked for one piece of advice for would-be writers.

“If you are a writer, you have to be someone who can be on your own,” he said. “You can sit in a room for eight hours, and at the end of it you will have done something.”

NEIL GENZLINGER The Scotsman welcomes obituaries and appreciations from contributors as well as suggestions of possible obituary subjects.

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“A writer has to be someone who can be on their own. You can sit in a room for eight hours, and at the end of it you will have done something”

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