Bryony Lavery


Bryony Lavery is a prolific British dramatist who has written over 100 plays, with some counts putting it as high as 130. Known for her successful and award-winning 1998 play Frozen. In addition to her work in theatre, she has also written for television and radio. She has written books including the biography Tallulah Bankhead and The Woman Writer's Handbook. She taught playwriting at the University of Birmingham.

Biography

Lavery grew up in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.
Having begun her career as an actress, she decided that she wanted to write plays with better parts for women. Early in her career she founded a theatre company called Les Oeufs Malades with actors Gerard Bell and Jessica Higgs. She also founded Female Trouble, More Female Trouble, and served as artistic director of Gay Sweatshop.
Her plays have a feminist undertone. She has written such plays as More Light, which has only one male speaking role, with almost entirely female casts. By 2002, she had written more than twenty plays. Later counts have put this number as high as 110, exceeding that of her contemporary Alan Ayckbourn. Including unproduced and spec work, this could go as high as 130 plays.
Lavery was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002.
In addition, she has written translations of such works as Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. In addition to this, she has also translated Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, twice, as well as Jourko Tourkka's Cherished Disappointments in Love.
She has written five plays for the National Theatre Connections series. Her successful Frozen triggered a controversy and discussion about artistic sources and plagiarism. It was the subject of a piece by Malcolm Gladwell published in The New Yorker and collected in his book What the Dog Saw.
She adapted Treasure Island, the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, as a play which was first performed on the Olivier Stage of the National Theatre, London, on 3 December 2014, directed by Polly Findlay.
Over the COVID-19 pandemic, she wrote 'about twenty things... on spec'. To date, none have been performed. This would put her total for plays as high as 130.
In the years since, she has written adaptations of The Lovely Bones, Swallows and Amazons, Brideshead Revisited, The Midnight Gang, Oliver Twist, The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage, Sputnik Sweetheart and Midnight Cowboy, for a range of prestige theatres such as the Arcola and Southwark Playhouse, and for directors such as Melly Still and Nicholas Hytner.
She was married to a man until her early thirties. Since that period, Lavery has identified as gay.

Selected works

  • The Two Marias – Theatre Centre
  • Her Aching Heart
  • * The Pink Paper's Play of the Year
  • Peter Pan – a pantomime
  • Goliath
  • More Light – National Theatre Connections
  • Frozen
  • *Nomination/Tony Award for Best Play
  • *Eileen Anderson Central Television Award
  • *TMA Best New Play Award
  • The Magic Toyshop
  • A Wedding Story
  • Illyria – NT Connections
  • Last Easter
  • Stockholm – Frantic Assembly
  • Red Sky – NT Connections
  • It Snows – NT Connections
  • Breathing Underwater – BBC Radio 7
  • Kursk – Young Vic
  • Beautiful Burnout – Frantic Assembly / National Theatre of Scotland
  • Dirt – Studio Theatre
  • The Believers – Tricycle Theatre

    Stage adaptations

  • A Christmas Carol – Chichester Festival Theatre / Birmingham Repertory Theatre / West Yorkshire Playhouse
  • Treasure Island – National Theatre / Birmingham Repertory Theatre
  • Brighton Rock – Pilot Theatre / York Theatre Royal / UK tour
  • The Lovely Bones – Royal & Derngate, Northampton / Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse / Northern Stage / Birmingham Repertory Theatre / New Wolsey Theatre
  • The Midnight Gang – Chichester Festival Theatre
  • Swallows and Amazons – Storyhouse / Grosvenor Park Open Air Theatre
  • The Book of Dust - La Belle Sauvage – Bridge Theatre.

    Complete List of Plays

  • Of All Living
  • Days at Court
  • Warbeck
  • I Was Too Young at the Time to Understand Why My Mother Was Crying
  • Sharing
  • Germany Calling, with Peter Leabourne
  • Grandmother's Footsteps
  • Snakes
  • The Catering Service
  • Floorshow, with others
  • Helen and Her Friends
  • Bag
  • Time, Gentlemen, Please
  • The Wild Bunch
  • Sugar and Spice
  • Unemployment: An Occupational Hazard?
  • Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, adaptation of the novel by Anita Loos
  • The Joker
  • The Family Album
  • Pamela Stephenson One Woman Show
  • Missing
  • Zulu, with Patrick Barlow
  • Female Trouble
  • The Black Hole of Calcutta, with Patrick Barlow
  • Götterdämmerung; or, Twilight of the Gods, with Patrick Barlow and Susan Todd
  • For Maggie, Betty and Ida, music by Paul Sand
  • More Female Trouble, music by Caroline Noh
  • Uniform and Uninformed, and Numerical Man
  • Hot Time
  • Calamity
  • Origin of the Species
  • The Wandsworth Warmers
  • The Zulu Hut Club
  • The Wandsworth Warmers Christmas Carol Concert
  • Over and Out
  • Witchcraze
  • Getting Through, by Nona Shepphard, music by Helen Glavin
  • The Wandsworth Warmers in Unbridled Passions
  • Sore Points
  • Mummy, with Sally Owen and L. Ortolja
  • Madagascar
  • The Headless Body, music by Stephanie Nunn
  • The Dragon Wakes
  • Puppet States
  • The Drury Lane Ghost, with Nona Shepphard
  • Two Marias
  • The Snow Queen
  • Wicked
  • Her Aching Heart
  • Kitchen Matters
  • Flight
  • Peter Pan, with Nona Shepphard
  • Creature - A Horror Party, for New Perspectives Theatre Company.
  • The Sleeping Beauty, with Nona Shepphard
  • The Way to Cook a Wolf
  • Nothing Compares To You
  • Down Among The Mini-Beasts
  • Ophelia
  • Goliath
  • More Light
  • Frozen
  • Shot Through The Heart
  • Illyria
  • Behind The Scenes At The Museum, adaptation of the Kate Atkinson novel
  • A Wedding Story
  • Cherished Disappointments in Love, translated from the play by Jouko Turkka
  • The Magic Toyshop, adapted from the Angela Carter novel
  • Precious Bane, adapted from the Mary Webb novel
  • Thyestes
  • A Doll’s House, translated from the Ibsen play
  • Discontented Winter: House Remix
  • Last Easter
  • Dracula, adapted from the Bram Stoker novel
  • Smoke
  • Yikes!
  • Uncle Vanya, translated from Chekhov
  • Red Sky
  • Stockholm
  • It Snows
  • The Bloody Chamber, adapted from the Angela Carter novel
  • A Christmas Carol, adapted from the Dickens novel
  • Kursk
  • The Wicked Lady, from the Magdalen King-Hall novel
  • Beautiful Burnout
  • Cesario
  • Dirt
  • Thursday
  • Queen Coal
  • The Believers
  • 57 Hours In The House of Culture
  • The One Hundred and One Dalmatians, adapted from the novel by Dodie Smith
  • Treasure Island, adapted from the Robert Louis Stevenson novel
  • Brideshead Revisited
  • Our Mutual Friend, adapted from Dickens
  • Balls
  • Brighton Rock, adapted from the Graham Greene novel
  • Swallows and Amazons, adapted from the Arthur Ransome novel
  • The Lovely Bones, adapted from the Alice Sebold novel
  • The Midnight Gang, adapted from the David Walliams novel, music by Joe Stilgoe
  • The Borrowers, adapted from the Mary Norton novel
  • Slime
  • Oliver Twist, from the Charles Dickens novel
  • Oscar and the Pink Lady - unproduced, for Sheffield Theatres
  • String, from the play collection Fifteen Heroines: The Labyrinth
  • Red Riding Hood - unproduced, for Theatre Royal Stratford
  • The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage, adapted from the Philip Pullman novel
  • Lovely, Loving, Loved - short play for the Birmingham Rep's Park Bench Plays
  • A Doll’s House, a new version
  • Sputnik Sweetheart, adapted from the Haruki Murakami novel
  • Midnight Cowboy, adapted from the James Leo Herlihy novel, music by Francis ‘Eg’ White
  • God Bless the NHS - a script-in-hand performance at Orange Tree Theatre

    Other

  • "Writing Plays" in The Women Writers Handbook, Aurora Metro Books, 2020.
Lovely, Loving, Loved received a television production with Sky Arts broadcasting the plays.