John Robert Whiting

John Robert Whiting (born Nov. 15, 1917, Salisbury, Wiltshire, Eng.—died June 16, 1963, Duddleswell, near Uckfield, Sussex) was a playwright whose intellectually demanding dramas avoided the audience-pleasing formulas current in the early 1950s and paved the way for the revolution in English drama that took place in mid-decade.

The son of a solicitor, he was educated at Taunton School, Somerset, and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London, and pursued an acting career before and after his service in the Royal Artillery during World War II. A play, Conditions of Agreement, written shortly after the war, was adapted for television as A Walk in the Desert. His first produced play was A Penny for a Song (1951), emphasizing war’s ridiculousness. Intense controversy was aroused by Saints’ Day, performed the same year; its black humour anticipated many English dramas to follow.

Marching Song (1954) and the acidulous comedy The Gates of Summer (1956) were too literary for audiences, and during the next seven years he wrote for films. In 1971 a motion picture was made from his The Devils (1961), based on Aldous Huxley’s novel The Devils of Loudun, about mass hysteria that sweeps through a convent in 17th-century France. His translations include two plays by Jean Anouilh: Madame De . . . and Traveller Without Luggage.