Terry Johnson (Left)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR - TERRY JOHNSON

Terry Johnson was born in Watford in 1955 and received his schooling there at a local comprehensive. He subsequently studied Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University and completed a B.A. there in 1977. His playwriting tutor was one of Britain's leading political dramatists, David Edgar.

Johnson's early, unpublished plays were staged in fringe venues. Interminus was an expressionist comedy set in a railway station. Amabel (1979) twists on the possibility that one of Henri Degas's dancers could have also been one of Toulouse-Lautrec's whores. Days Here So Dark (1981) was set in the contemporary Outer Hebrides but against a background of a Viking Raid.

Johnson's best known plays fall into two groups. One involves imagined encounters between famous people. Insignificance (1982, revised 1995), the play which first brought him international success and was later filmed by the great English director, Nicholas Roeg, takes place in a New York hotel room in 1953. It brings together a blonde actress [Monroe], her baseball playing husband [Joe DiMaggio], a professor [Einstein] and an inquisitorial senator [McCarthy]. Hysteria (1993) is set in Freud's Hampstead study where the dying psychoanalyst is visited by Salvador Dali, Abraham Yahuda (Freud's doctor and a Jewish scholar) and the daughter of one of Freud's famous early cases. Hitchcock Blonde (2003), postulates a relationship between the director and Janet Leigh's body double on the set of Psycho.

Johnson writes about the famous, he told The Australian, 'because I've always been interested in people who existed. It's something to do with the iconography. The reason people identify with celebrities is a kind of necessity to define their humanity in relation to the best or the most extraordinary or the most outre. And that's surely to do with our need to try to define ourselves in this scary quivering mass of humanity. It's very Jungian. It's archetypal. In the end I just find it easier [to write about well-known people] than writing the people I invent. I know I can tune into other people and get inspired. I can't imagine having written a play about a famous film director who we've never heard of. I can't imagine where I'd have come up with the idea or how I'd have developed it - and I've always wanted to write plays that are bigger than my living room. It's more of an imaginative exercise for me than a self-searching one'.

The second group looks at the realities which lie behind English sexual humour. Unsuitable for Adults (1984) is set in the world of left wing fringe cabaret as the relationship of a feminist stand up comedian and her mimic boyfriend disintegrates when he becomes involved with a stripper. In Dead Funny (1994, Fortune 2001) the characters try to retreat into mimicry of television and variety comedians rather than face up to their personal dilemmas. Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick (1998) straddles the two groups, following the off screen relationship of Sid James, Barbara Windsor and Kenneth Williams during the final fifteen years of the Carry On series of films. Johnson's recent Channel 4 play, Not Only But Always, about the working relationship of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore also combines his major thematic concerns.

Johnson's lesser known works fall outside this pattern. Cries from the Mammal House (1984) is usually interpreted as an allegory of the West's relationship to the Third World told through a family saga set alternately in a declining English zoo and Mauritius. Tuesday's Child , co-written with the actress Kate Lock (BBC TV 1985, staged 1986), contemplates a virgin birth in contemporary Ireland. Time Trouble (BBC TV 1986) uses an exhibition chess tournament as a Cold War metaphor while Imagine Drowning (1991) concerns a wife's search for her journalist husband who has disappeared near the nuclear plant at Sellafield. Other television writing includes Blood and Water and The Chemistry Lesson for the BBC Ghosts season. His latest stage play, Piano/Forte, 'about nobody famous', opens at the Royal Court Theatre in September.

In addition to directing the premieres of his five most recent plays and the 1996 London revival of Insignificance, Johnson has also directed in the West End the works of a number of rising English dramatists. These include Shelagh Stephenson (The Memory of Water), Philip Ridley (Sparkleshark), David Farr (Elton John's Glasses) and Joe Penhall (Dumb Show). He adapted and directed the Restoration comedy The London Cuckolds for the Royal National Theatre. (Former Fortune actor, Tom Peters, appeared in the production.) At the legendary Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago he has directed John Malkevich in two plays by Johnson's English playwriting contemporary, Stephen Jeffreys (The Libertine and Lost Land). His other West End work as director includes recent revivals of Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloan and the stage version by Dale Wasserman of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Dunedin theatregoers will know Johnson for his television direction of Alan Ayckbourn's The Way Upstream and Tim Firth's Neville's Island. The film version of Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick, retitled for the screen Cor, Blimey!, has also been seen on the small screen in this country.

Johnson has observed: "I have a certain obsession with comedy and a certain obsession with women. I'm getting better at the former but I'm still no good at the latter." Underneath their often hilarious, farcical surface, Johnson's best known plays dispassionately dissect marriage and relationships. Speaking of his preferred theatrical style he remarked: "I write comedies rather than tragedies because I can't stand being in a theatre if nobody's laughing. Laughter's part of the deal with an audience. It's the sugar of the medicine" and he acknowledged his aim was for the audience to "release their laughter so they can approach the dark ideas in the play with an open heart."

Johnson, undeniably one of the most talented and successful English dramatists of the last two decades, was named the Most Promising Playwright of 1982 by both the London Evening Standard and Plays and Players. He won the John Whiting Award in 1991, the Mayer-Whitworth Award in 1993 and has twice won the Olivier Award for Best Comedy. For Dead Funny he won the Lloyds Private Banking 25,000 pounds prize as Playwright of the Year. It also won the Writers' Guild/Wimpey Award for Best West End Play (as did Hysteria) and the London Critics' Circle Award for Best New Play of its year.

Hitchcock Blonde opened at London's Royal Court Theatre in April 2003. The production then transferred into a West End theatre for three months. Last year it was presented by both the Melbourne Theatre Company and the Royal Queensland Theatre Company. This Fortune production is the play's New Zealand premiere.

Perhaps surprisingly, Johnson is not a Hitchcock buff. He told The Australian that he became intrigued with the idea of writing a play about him precisely because he always found Hitch's movies 'rather disappointing' and confessed he 'never quite got them'. In reading about Hitchcock he came to realize that what he was interested in was Hitchcock critics - 'I was interested in who would sit down and deconstruct the shower scene and become obsessed by the colours in Vertigo'. From this evolved his acknowledged theme: 'Hitchcock's obsessions and how they relate to the obsessions of the people who are obsessed with Hitchcock. And I discovered quite quickly that it's all pseudo psycho-sexual and that was the point of fascination really'.

Alister McDonald (Fortune Theatre Dramaturg)