Welcome to johnspurling.com where you can find details of John’s novels and plays, with reviews, commentary by the author and photos of the original productions.
The Novels
‘What is the novelist’s dearest dream - apart of course from a call from his agent saying “I’ve had Spielberg on the line offering one million and I know he’ll go higher”? Is it perhaps to be endowed with that magic talent that can weave so potent a spell that the reader is unable to stop turning the pages, such is the desire to know what happens next? John Spurling has that talent.’
Nicholas Fleming reviewing After Zenda in The Spectator, 25 Feb.1995.
The author’s agent for his novels, with the exception of A Book of Liszts, is David Marshall, Marshall Rights, 19 Tennyson Road, London E17 8PR, telephone 020 85215489, mobile (0)7944 68110, david@marshallrights.co.uk
The Plays
29 of John’s plays have been performed on stage, radio or TV over the past 45 years, here is a selection of them.
Ever since the end of the 17th century when most of our greatest playwrights were dead, British plays have tended to be simple and conservative
in form, however radical their content. John, with one or two other new playwrights in the 1960s, set out to change that.
Two of his earliest plays, MacRune’s Guevara (1969) and In the Heart of the British Museum (1971) were revolutionary both in structure and
content when they were first produced, and still are. A revival of MacRune’s Guevara off-Broadway in 2006 seemed just as innovatory to the
young performers and its audiences as it did in the original National Theatre production 37 years earlier.
MacRune’s Guevara was published by Calder and Boyars in 1969 and In the Heart of the British Museum in 1972.
The author’s agent for his plays is Macnaughton Lord Representation. For performance applications please contact:
MLR, 2nd Floor, 16 Crucifix Lane, London SE1 3JW
tel: 020 7407 9201, info@mlrep.com www.mlrep.com
|