Adam Brace
Playwright and ‘dramaturg’ who wowed critics with Stovepipe
ADAM BRACE, the playwright and director, who has died following a short illness aged 43, burst on to the theatre scene in 2009 with his promenade play
Stovepipe, staged at the West 12 shopping centre in Shepherd’s Bush, in which audiences were invited to follow a soldier working for private security contractors in Iraq searching the streets of Amman for his colleague.
Originally premiered at the Hightide festival in Aldeburgh, the play won universally positive reviews. Charles Spencer, writing in
The Daily Telegraph,
admitted that when he heard that a play about mercenaries was to be staged at a West London shopping centre, he had “feared a worthy piece of site-specific drama with a feeble script and iffy performances.”
In fact, he went on, “Stovepipe turns out to be the most exciting theatrical thriller in town, offering a succession of coups de théâtre, a clever plot, and intense and persuasive performances.”
Yet Brace only ever wrote one more full-length play,
They Drink It in the Congo,
which ran at the Almeida in 2016. A satire on white post-colonial guilt, it concerned a Kenyan-born female Cambridge graduate who attempts to put on a Congolese arts festival in London, but discovers the Congolese diaspora is just as riven with violent ethnic and political hatreds as the Congolese in Africa.
“Brace’s sharp-toothed satire is a mess at times,” observed Chris Bennion in
The Sunday Telegraph, “but it is also a dense, witty and fascinating piece of writing that suffers only in its own ambition.”
Brace subsequently gave up writing plays and threw his energies into directing, becoming resident “associate dramaturg” of the Soho Theatre – effectively gingering up other people’s scripts – and, as the Stage
newspaper described him at the end of last year, “the most high-profile director you’ve never heard of ”.
That was after a year in which he had worked on critically acclaimed productions including Liz Kingsman’s hit One-woman Show about an ambitious hack who aspires to be the next Fleabag; Haley Mcgee’s solo show Age Is a Feeling,a
hit at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe; Sh!t Theatre’s subversive comedy Evita Too, and the London revival of Alex Edelman’s offbroadway hit Just for Us, which he was expected to take to Broadway this summer.
Adam Brace was born in London on March 25 1980 and educated at St John’s School, Leatherhead, landing his first theatrical job, aged 14, stuffing announcement envelopes at the Thorndike Theatre.
He read Drama at the University of Kent at Canterbury and later took an MA in writing for performance at Goldsmiths, University of London. He claimed on his website to have worked at various times “as a journalist, security guard, EFL teacher, professional essay writer for children of foreign politicians.”
In 2008 his short play A Real Humane Person Who Cares And All That, in which a liberal-minded British ambassador in a former Soviet republic is outwitted and humiliated by a resident British businessman with links to a local warlord, was a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe.
In 2010, surprisingly following his success with Stovepipe, Brace took off to Moscow, having agreed to work for a Russian businessman adapting a novel by Andrei Platonov into a film script. Instead he suffered some sort of breakdown: “I didn’t really want to be a writer. I didn’t really want to be anything. I didn’t really want to be alive. It took me a while to fully get over that. Even though I wrote afterwards, I knew I was on another path.”
After spending time teaching English at the University of Southampton and working at the Gate Theatre, Notting Hill, in 2016 he joined the Soho Theatre, rising to be associate director.
He is survived by his partner Becca – the comedian Rebecca Biscuit.
Adam Brace, born March 25 1980, died April 29 2023