Brian Clark Biography

British playwright, born in Bournemouth, educated at the Central School of Speech and Drama and at Nottingham University; he became a teacher and, from 1968 to 1972, a staff tutor in drama at the University of Hull. His stage plays have attempted to give a human dimension to large social and political issues. They include Can You Hear Me at the Back? (1979), in which a middle-aged architect reassesses a life that has become both personally and professionally unfulfilling—he is in a sterile marriage, and has been responsible for the development of a drab and ugly ‘new town’; and The Petition (1986), about the wife of a reactionary old general who, after fifty years of marriage, becomes involved in the campaign against nuclear weapons. But Clark remains best known for Whose Life Is It, Anyway? (1978), which involves a paralysed car crash victim's attempts to defy those officiously keeping him alive and becomes a powerful, yet often humorous, argument for euthanasia. That piece was adapted for the theatre from television, a medium for which Clark has written many ‘one-off’ plays and the serial Telford's Change.