It took a story that was familiar and infused it with a startling sense of linguistic urgency and political interrogation. A dramatic and haunting consideration of the relationship between Percy and Mary Shelley and Lord Byron and Claire Clairmont, it was a play unlike any I’d seen at that time. Before I’d properly written anything of my own I saw a student production of his 1984 play Bloody Poetry.
I first encountered the plays of Howard Brenton right at the beginning of my life as a playwright.
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