J&A is sad to report the death of beloved playwright David Pownall, who created a wealth of internationally renowned stage, TV and radio plays over the course of his long career.
Born in Liverpool in 1938, his early memories of the Second World War, in particular The Blitz, would go on to shape much of his work. As a young man he worked in the motor industry and spent his evenings writing, hoping to one day make a career out of it. He moved to Zambia in the early 1960s to work in copper mining, and it was there that some of his early plays were produced.
On his return to England he began to write full time, taking up residency at Coalville’s Century Theatre and then at the Duke’s Playhouse in Lancaster, later co-founding Paines Plough Theatre Company with John Adams. His plays reflected the local environment, as well as meditations on the works of Shakespeare.
David is perhaps best known for his play Master Class, which combined his deep passion for music with his preoccupation with the unending struggle of the artist versus the state. Centring on Stalin bullying Shostakovich and Prokofiev into writing music he deemed fit for the Soviet people, Master Class was first performed at the Haymarket Theatre in 1983 and has been translated into over twenty languages worldwide.
Alongside his sixty stage plays and over one hundred radio plays written for the BBC, David was also a successful novelist and short story writer, publishing over fifteen novels and collections throughout his life. Many of his books were inspired by his time spent living in Africa.
He received numerous awards during his career, including the John Whiting Prize, the New York Theatre Yearbook, the London Stage Directors’ Award, two Edinburgh Festival Fringe First Award, two Giles Cooper Awards and three Sony Awards. David was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1976, and Keele University made him an honorary Doctor of Letters in 2000.
David leaves behind an extraordinary legacy, and he is survived by his wife Alex, his sons Tom and Max, his stepdaughters Dom and Georgie, his brother Barry and his grandson Zayden. In the words of his close friend, writer and actor Torben Betts, ‘He never wrote with an audience or a market in mind. He wrote simply because the ideas and the words and the characters poured joyously out of him. If the work was of any value to others, then so much the better.’
