David Pownall
Playwright
David Pownall (1938 – 2022) was an internationally-renowned playwright for stage, TV and radio. His stage plays have been performed extensively, including runs on Broadway, and at the National Theatre, Old Vic, Wyndham and Barbican in London, and the RSC. His best-known works include Music to Murder By (winner of an Edinburgh Festival Fringe First), Livingstone and Sechele (winner of the London Stage Directors’ Award) and Elgar’s Rondo, which was commissioned by the RSC. His best known work is Master Class, a portrayal of composers Shostakovich and Prokofiev in the grip of Stalin’s cultural dictatorship. It has been revived numerous times in the UK and performed in over twenty countries, many of them ex-Soviet Territories, including Russia. He once declared that he intended to write ‘to the bitter end,’ and was working on a radio play until just before his death in 2022.