Bryony Lavery

In a career spanning nearly forty years of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, the highly prolific BL has seen over sixty of her plays and other entertainments staged, mostly in London. She has also written translations, adaptations, and essays. Much of her impressive output remains unpublished. She was one of the driving forces in the feminist and socialist theatre groups of the 1970s (no other playwright had so long and fruitful a relationship with Monstrous Regiment ), and she remained a committed experimenter and iconoclast, often defying stage convention and any hint of naturalism. Her plots often tend toward the hilariously improbable, and her endings toward happiness and reconciliation. More recently, her handling of social problems and personal tragedies has become bleaker and starker. These darker plays have brought her greater success than her former light-hearted ones.