Obituary - Stephen Jeffreys, playwright known for The Libertine who found early success in Scotland

Died: September 17 2018

STEPHEN Jeffreys, who has died of a brain tumour aged 68, was a playwright who reimagined history across several centuries in daring ways that illustrated contemporary concerns. This worked most strikingly in his best known play, The Libertine, but was also the case with his recently revived adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1982), a reworking of Richard Brome’s 17th century comedy, A Jovial Crew (1992) for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and, for Sydney Theatre Company, The Convict’s Opera (2008), an update of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera featuring contemporary pop hits.

There were pop songs there too in Jeffreys’ stage version of Backbeat (2011). An early adaptation of Iain Softley’s film about the early days of The Beatles with only Softley’s name attached had been seen at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, before being reworked by Jeffreys for the West End.

Jeffreys was also a great teacher, who, during a decade as literary associate at the Royal Court Theatre in London throughout the 1990s, effectively nurtured an entire generation of British playwrights into creative being. Beginning his tenure in 1992, Jeffreys championed Sarah Kane’s era-defining debut play, Blasted, Mojo by Jez Butterworth and The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh. Works by Simon Stephens, Jonathan Harvey, Tanika Gupta, Joe Penhall and many others were also brought to life on Jeffreys’ watch.

Playwright and current artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh David Greig described Jeffreys as “a dazzlingly good teacher. His influence was really widespread, and he shaped an entire generation of us. He really understood structure, and was inspiringly good at teaching it. The Royal Court often wanted quite raw voices from young writers who maybe hadn’t experienced much theatre, and Stephen could teach people the rudiments of the craft of play-writing in a way that enabled you.”

Jeffreys was born in Crouch End, London, and decided to be a writer aged 12. He graduated from Southampton University with an English literature degree in 1972, and began teaching at a London comprehensive. He briefly worked as an assistant electrician at the Royal Court’s upstairs space in 1975, and went on to teach at the Cumbria College of Art and Design. His first produced play, Like Dolls or Angels (1977), about a stuntman, won an award at the National Student Drama Festival.

In the early 1980s, Jeffreys was instrumental in setting up Pocket Theatre, based at the Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal, Cumbria, with whom he became writer-in-residence, and who toured Hard Times. It was here he met and worked with actors Rob Pickavance, Alison Peebles and Gerry Mulgrew, who forged the idea to found the theatre company that became Communicado. It was his mother, according to Jeffreys, who came up with the name for the company.

In 1984 Jeffreys wrote Communicado’s hit version of Carmen, transposing Prosper Merimee’s original story to the time of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. The show was an Edinburgh Festival Fringe hit, and transferred to the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn.

Two years later Communicado produced Desire, Jeffreys’ update of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Faustian short story, The Bottle Imp, which he set in a time of revolutionary fervour on an un-named Caribbean island. Again it was a hit, and toured the country.

“There was a point,” Jeffreys told The Herald in 2014, “when I was better known as a writer in Scotland than England.”

In 1990, Valued Friends, about four flatmates who are offered a fortune to vacate their home for property developers, was a hit at Hampstead theatre. A Going Concern (1993), about a failing family business, followed. The Libertine first appeared at the Royal Court in 1994, and told the scandalous story of 17th century poet John Wilmot, aka the Earl of Rochester, an amoral hedonist who ostracised himself from the court of Charles II and effectively pleasured himself to death.

The roots of Jeffreys’ play date back to 1975, when his dentist was off-loading his library to patients so as not to lead his increasingly curious 13-year -old daughter astray. Jeffreys was gifted a copy of Rochester's tellingly named play, SODOM. It took 17 years before Jeffreys wrote The Libertine.

“At the time, the 17th century seemed more real to me than life under John Major,” Jeffrey told The Herald. “I'd got very bored with all these grim naturalistic plays, and I'd already written a play called The Clink, which was about the death of Elisabeth I. That opened in London the week Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister, so seemed to say something about life in 1990s Britain.”

The Libertine gathered added traction a decade after its premiere when it was made into a film starring Johnny Depp as Rochester, with John Malkovich as Charles II. Malkovich had played Rochester in Chicago in Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s 1996 production. Jeffreys provided the screenplay for the film.

His original stage version was revived at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow in 2014 for what was its first UK production in two decades. More recently, it was revived on the West End in 2016, with Dominic Cooper in the title role.

When The Libertine was first seen at the Royal Court, Kane’s play, Blasted, was causing a furore in the venue's upstairs theatre. Both, in different ways, announced how drama, like the world, was changing.

Generosity to other writers was key to Jeffreys’ make-up. As Greig points out, “He was passionate about writers, and would champion their work in a way that went way beyond his own writing.”

Other works include the blues-based I Just Stopped By to See the Man (2000), directed by Richard Wilson, and Bugles at the Gates of Jalalabad (2009), part of a season at the Tricycle covering Afghan history. On screen, he penned the screenplay of Diana (2013), which cast Naomi Watts as the doomed people's princess in an adaptation of Kate Snell’s book Diana Her Last Love. In 2016, the same year as The Libertine was seen in the West End, Jeffreys wrote a version of Ben Johnson’s The Alchemist for the RSC.

For all his technical expertise, Jeffreys enjoyed flying blind, and not knowing where a work might end up. Talking about The Libertine, he described this approach as “like the difference between getting a box of fireworks and looking at the label that says how much they explode, then watching them launch themselves into the air and see what happens. That's when things become really exciting.”

Jeffreys is survived by his wife Annabel Arden and their two sons, Ralph and Jack.

NEIL COOPER