Author and playwright best known for his literary drama Tom and Viv
Michael Hastings, who has died aged 74, shot to prominence in the first wave of new playwrights at the Royal Court in the 1950s. His best known play, Tom and Viv, about the difficult marriage of Ts Eliot and Vivienne Haigh-Wood, was presented there in 1984, by which time he was well established as a novelist, biographer and author of short stories. He was an unclassifiable writer, despite his sporadic allegiance over the years to the Royal Court. Much of his work is imbued with his experience of travelling in Spain, Kenya and Brazil. The fractured domestic relationships which he documented in Tom and Viv, and in his last West End play, Calico (2004), reflect his own difficult childhood and a lifetime interest in psychoanalysis.
Hastings was brought up by his mother, Marie, in a council flat in Brixton, south London.
Michael Hastings, who has died aged 74, shot to prominence in the first wave of new playwrights at the Royal Court in the 1950s. His best known play, Tom and Viv, about the difficult marriage of Ts Eliot and Vivienne Haigh-Wood, was presented there in 1984, by which time he was well established as a novelist, biographer and author of short stories. He was an unclassifiable writer, despite his sporadic allegiance over the years to the Royal Court. Much of his work is imbued with his experience of travelling in Spain, Kenya and Brazil. The fractured domestic relationships which he documented in Tom and Viv, and in his last West End play, Calico (2004), reflect his own difficult childhood and a lifetime interest in psychoanalysis.
Hastings was brought up by his mother, Marie, in a council flat in Brixton, south London.
- 12/1/2011
- by Michael Coveney
- The Guardian - Film News
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