Neil Bartlett (playwright)
Neil Vivian Bartlett, OBE is a British director, performer, translator and writer. He was one of the founding members of Gloria, a production company established in 1988 to produce his work along with that of Nicolas Bloomfield, Leah Hausman and Simon Mellor.
His work has garnered several awards, including the 1985 Perrier Award, the Time Out Dance Umbrella Award, a Writers Guild Award, a Time Out Theatre Award, and the Special Jury Prize at the Cork Film Festival. His production of The Dispute won a Time Out Award for Best Production in the West End and the 1999 TMA Best Touring Production award. He was appointed an OBE in 2000 for his services to the arts.
His 2004 production of Shakespeare's Pericles was nominated for an Olivier Award for Outstanding Theatrical Achievement in 2004.
Career
Bartlett's first book, Who Was That Man, showed how the gay history of London in the 1890s affected Bartlett's life as a gay man in London in the 1980s. His fourth novel, The Disappearance Boy, was published in London by Bloomsbury Circus in January 2014; his most recent novel Address Book was published in London by Inkandescent in November 2021.Bartlett's early performance work with Gloria included A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, Sarrasine and Night after Night. He also served as artistic director at the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith from 1994 until 2004. At the Lyric he directed productions of classic British plays, foreign classics which he translated or adapted, and a series of notable Christmas shows. The following are some of the plays he directed and translated:
- The first English production of Jean Genet's Splendid's
- Kleist's Prince of Homburg and Marivaux's La Dispute
- His adaptation of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, and A Christmas Carol.
- Adaptation of The Servant by Robin Maugham.
Since leaving the Lyric he has created work for leading cultural producers including the National Theatre in London, the Abbey in Dublin, the Bristol Old Vic, the Manchester Royal Exchange, the Edinburgh International Festival, the Manchester International Festival, the Brighton Festival, the Aldeburgh Festival, the Holland Festival, the Wellcome Foundation and Tate Britain.
He also took part in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty Six Books, where he wrote a piece based upon a chapter of the King James Bible
In 2022, he adapted Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando for a West End production that was directed by Michael Grandage and starred Emma Corrin.
In 2016 Bartlett read aloud the complete text of Oscar Wilde's De Profundis in the old chapel of HM Prison Reading, where Wilde had been incarcerated from 1895 to 1897.
Work
Fiction
Who Was That Man: A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall- "Caesar's Gallic Wars" Mr. Clive and Mr. Page Skin Lane
- 'When the Time Comes; or, the Case of the Man Who Didn't Know' The Disappearance Boy Address Book 2021