Michael Hastings
Michael Hastings was a British playwright, novelist, and poet, born into a working-class family in Brixton, London. Originally training as a tailor, his career path shifted dramatically when his first play, "Don't Destroy Me," premiered in 1956, marking the beginning of a prolific writing career. Hastings became associated with the "angry young men" movement, reflecting the social unrest and aspirations of the youth during his time. His works often draw on current events for inspiration, tackling themes of political turmoil and personal conflict, as seen in plays like "The Silence of Lee Harvey Oswald" and "For the West (Uganda)," which critique political regimes and societal issues.
Hastings produced a range of works, including novels like "The Game" and "The Frauds," as well as a biography of poet Rupert Brooke. His writing is characterized by a deep understanding of history and politics, alongside sharp characterizations that resonate with audiences. Through his engagement with the Jewish community in Brixton and broader political themes, Hastings carved out a significant niche in the landscape of British theatre and literature, leaving a lasting impact that continues to be studied and appreciated.
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Subject Terms
Michael Hastings
Writer
- Born: September 2, 1938
- Birthplace: London, England
Biography
Son of Max Hastings, a tailor in the Brixton section of London, and his wife, Marie Katherine Griffiths Hastings, Michael Gerald Hastings expected to follow his father’s trade. Already tailoring suits in early adolescence, in 1953, he began a three-year apprenticeship with the well-known tailors Kilgour, French, and Stanbury. His plans changed, however, when his first play, Don’t Destroy Me, was produced in 1956, a month before Hastings’s eighteenth birthday. The next year, that play and Yes and After, having played in London, were taken to New York for American audiences. In 1957, Hastings oversaw their New York production.
Still living in Brixton at this point, Hastings avoided political polemic in his plays. However, he decidedly wrote from a leftist perspective and was lumped with the group of creative artists generally referred to as “the angry young men.” Certainly Hastings was writing at a time of considerable unrest among young people. He penetrated their psyches—much like his own—convincingly. Encouraged by the success of his plays, Hastings wrote two novels, The Game and The Frauds. In 1961, his Love Me, Lambeth, and Other Poems was published to favorable reviews. He was still under twenty-five.
In his early writing, Hastings used Brixton as his setting and focused particularly on the Jewish population of this working-class section of London, much as Clifford Odets focused on Jewish Americans in the Bronx in his early plays. Current events intrigued Hastings. He scanned the newspapers for stories with dramatic potential. Among his plays stimulated by news stories was The Silence of Lee Harvey Oswald that revealed an Oswald caught between two women, a controlling mother and a complaining wife. In For the West (Uganda), Hastings explores the brutal regime of British-educated dictator Idi Amin, the Ugandan strongman who tortured and killed thousands of his subjects. Hastings suggests that Amin’s lessons in brutality were learned from the British who had once controlled parts of East Africa. This play has been compared to Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1921).
Hastings collaborated with Jonathan Miller on The Emperor, a dramatic adaptation of Ryszard Kapuociñski’s The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, which recounts the collapse of Ethiopian emperor Hailie Selassie’s regime. Turning his attention to a literary figure, in Tom and Viv, Hastings wrote about T. S. Eliot’s disastrous marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood. He produced television documentaries, a screenplay, a novel about the marriage of Karl Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, and a novel based on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. He wrote a perceptive biography of poet Rupert Brooke and published a collection of short stories. Hastings is remembered for his penetrating understanding of the history and politics of his era and for his sharp characterizations.