Sarah Daniels
Sarah Daniels (born November 1956 in London ) is a British dramatist. She has been a prolific writer since her first professionally performed play, Ripen Our Darkness, was given a production at the Royal Court in 1981.
Career
Daniels' playwriting career took off after she sent in a script to the Royal Court Theatre in London for reading and spent a year as the writer-in-residence of Sheffield University’s English department. Since the early 1980s her plays have appeared at other venues including the National Theatre, the Battersea Arts Centre, the Crucible, Sheffield and Chicken Shed. She was the first living British playwright to have a play premiered at the National Theatre in London when Neaptide was performed there in 1986. She has also written episodes of the soap-operas EastEnders and Holby City, and the long-running BBC children's series Grange Hill.
Daniels was involved in the "Video Nasties" censorship debate of the 1980s: in her 1983 play Masterpieces, she mistakenly described the low-budget horror film Snuff (1976) as a real-life snuff film.[1]
Daniels is a popular and critically acclaimed writer and has had two collections of her plays published by Methuen.
Daniels has also been a member of the board of directors for the Clean Break theatre company. Daniels' civil partner of many years, activist and schools inspector Claire Walton, died in 2009.
In June 2019, Daniels' dramatization of Jeremy Gavron's 2015 A Woman on the Edge of Time, a memoir of his mother Hannah Gavron, was broadcast as the 15 Minute Drama on BBC Radio 4.[2]
Plays include
- Ma's Flesh Is Grass (1981)
- Ripe Our Darkness (1981)
- Masterpieces (1983)
- The Devil's Gateway (1983)
- Neaptide (1984)
- Byrthrite (1986)
- The Gut Girls (1988)
- Beside Herself (1990)
- Head Rot Holiday (1991)
- The Madness of Esme and Shaz (1994)
- Purple Side Coasters (1995)
- Best Mates (2000)
- Morning Glory (2001)
- Dust (2003)
- Flying Under Bridges (2005)
- Whose Afraid of Virgina's Sister? (2006)
- God Blind Me (radio play 2007)
- But If You Try Sometimes (radio play 2011)
References
- Gilleman, Luc (Fall 2010). "Drama and Pornography: Sarah Daniels's Masterpieces and Anthony Neilson's The Censor". Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. 25 (1): 75–98. ISSN 0888-3203.
- Dramatized by: Sarah Daniels; Director: Emma Harding (10 June 2019). "A Woman on the Edge of Time". 15 Minute Drama. BBC. BBC Radio 4. Retrieved 14 June 2019.