David Cregan, British playwright, Died at 83

David Appleton Quartus Cregan known as David Cregan was born on September 30,1931, in Buxton, Derbyshire, and died on September 7, 2015.

He was a British playwright.

He studied English at Clare College, Cambridge, where he was an active member of the Footlights.

David was 10 when he wrote his first play, Jason and the Golden Fleece (three minutes long), at prep school.

He the proceeded to the Leys school in Cambridge.

Cregan did two years of national service in the RAF (1952-54).

David then became an English and drama teacher, he worked for two years in a private school in Palm Beach, Florida, before teaching at Burnage grammar school for boys, Manchester, in 1957.

He taught at the Hatfield school in Hertfordshire, from 1958 to 1966, where he lived with his wife, Ailsa Wynne Willson, whom he married in 1960.

However, after Cregan stop teaching to become a full-time playwright in 1966 after sending ‘miniature’ to Keith Johnson at the Royal Court. Then he wrote ‘The dancers and transcendin’.

David’s and director Sam Waters and Brian Protheroe was good friends, they began in Edinburgh.

Titles at the Royal Court were The Dancers and Transcending (both 1966), and The Houses by the Green (1968), an inventive commedia dell’arte for four characters, each playing two roles, about possession, sex and marriage.

David’s Orange Tree portfolio included Tina (1975), a blistering two-hander for a sympathetic teacher (played by Stephanie Cole) and an abused, underprivileged pupil (Sharman Macdonald, Keira Knightley’s mother, who was an actor before becoming a playwright herself); Nice Dorothy (1993), a comedy of generations in which an older woman falls in love with a younger man, who was only 25 yrs old (“I adore your age,” he said. “It’s like being in bed with Teddy”); and Whispers Along the Patio (2001), a conversation piece of romantic rivalry over a newly arrived Macedonian girl in Surrey.

‘Summer again’ (2004), was one of his last plays.

The collaboration between David and Brian Protheroe resulted in writing a total of six pantomimes for the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, of which Cinderella (1989) was nominated for the Whitbread Prize for Fringe Play for Children.

Cregan was also an award winning radio dramatist, writing for BBC Radio 3, 4 and for the World Service.

In the year 2006 David was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, during that time he wrote several community plays, six pantomimes for the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, 10 television plays or series and 15 radio plays.

He left behind his wife Ailsa, and their four children and six grandchildren.

David Cregan passed away at 83 yrs old.