John Arden

John Arden , 1930-, English playwright and novelist. In a manner reminiscent of Brecht, Arden's dramas employ songs, poetry, and visceral realism to make sharp, political points. His plays include Sergeant Musgrave's Dance (1959), The Island of the Mighty (1972), The Little Grey Home in the West (1978), and a veiled attack on the British occupation of Northern Ireland, Vandaleur's Folly (1981). He has also written two novels and a book of essays, To Present the Pretense (1978).

Arden, John (1930– ), playwright, had his first professional production at the Royal Court, of The Waters of Babylon (1957), a satirical play about a corrupt municipal lottery organized by a slum landlord. This was followed by Live Like Pigs (1958), dealing with social conflict and violence on a housing estate. Serjeant Musgrave's Dance (1959), set in a colliery town in the North of England in 1860–80, shows Musgrave, a deserter from the British Army, attempting to exact revenge for the death of a colleague, but finding that violence breeds violence. Arden here mixes a rich idiosyncratic, semi-historical prose with ballad and verse, as he does in Armstrong's Last Goodnight (1964), another play about violence. The Workhouse Donkey (1963) is a play about municipal corruption. Widely praised as one of the most innovatory dramatists of the 1960s, his later plays (written with his wife Margaretta D'Arcy) have been less exuberant and ambiguous, and more deliberately socialist and doctrinaire.