Donald Howarth, playwright who tackled apartheid, homosexuality and mixed-race love – obituary

Donald Howarth, who has died aged 88, was the last of the “angry young men” who revolutionised British theatre at the Royal Court in the late 1950s.

He was a gentle revolutionary, his plays tackling once provocative subjects with humanity and guts, from mixed-race relationships to homosexual love. But he also had an uncredited continuing role as a bastion of all that theatre should stand for. He championed future trailblazers, including Hanif Kureshi, promoted a wealth of international voices to the London stage and made confrontational theatrical stances against apartheid.

Donald Alfred Howarth was born in Woolwich on November 5 1931. His mother, Phoebe, née Worsdell, was a maid at a boy’s school. His soldier father, Arthur, was an unsympathetic figure, and when Howarth was still a baby, Phoebe left, walking 40 miles to a relative with her child wrapped in blankets, sleeping in hedgerows.

Arthur vengefully refused her a divorce and denied her access to her child. Brought up by an aunt, for many years Howarth thought his mother was simply a door-to-door toy seller.

A maths teacher at Grange High School for Boys in Bradford cast him as Olivia in Twelfth Night. He won at place at Esme Church’s Northern Theatre School, and from there went to Dundee Rep, where he once persuaded the director of a murder mystery not to let the cast read the ending until just before they opened.

Although he was not much of an actor, rep taught him the do’s and don’ts of writing dialogue and helped him to understand what he called “the literature of talking”.

After a spell as a merchant seaman, which he endured by studying the dialogue of his crewmates, he wrote Sugar in the Morning (1959), the story of a lonely landlady electrified by a new tenant. The prosaic setting, unsentimental affection and sharp wit were blended boldly with a Greek chorus-type character who addresses the audience throughout.

His next effort, All Good Children (1960) was an ecclesiastical tale with an incestuous undertow. Its sequel, the witty and more stylised A Lily in Little India (1962) saw the West End debut of Ian McKellen.

Three Months Gone (1970) starred a vampish Diana Dors, her faded glamour and gutsy stage presence stunning sceptical critics and proving Howarth’s great instinct for casting. However, although female characters were commendably plentiful in his work, they were often drawn in broad strokes.

A censorious ITV production of Sugar in the Morning unforgivably reinvented the black character as white, effectively castrating the story, but “Scarborough” for the BBC’s Thirty-Minute Theatre (1972), a concupiscent reimagining of Adam and Eve climaxing in a threesome, managed a televisual first in its remarkably direct depiction of polyamory.

It is possibly his finest work, and certainly his starkest, a tender, tortured piece that enchantingly blends sexual frankness with spiritual innocence.

Rather than boycott South Africa over apartheid, he attacked it with Othello Slegs Blankes (“Othello Whites Only”), for The Space in Cape Town in 1975, a risky enterprise in ridicule that worked splendidly. His production of Waiting for Godot (1980) became a grim metaphor for the political situation and the fading hope of change; the internationally acclaimed production is still considered one of the five most important ever staged of the play.

His time as literary manager at the Royal Court saw more ethnically diverse work, such as the revered South African season of 1973, and Mustapha Matura’s Play Mas (1975) and Rum and Coca Cola (1976), and Yemi Ajibade’s Parcel Post (1976), all three of which he directed with sympathy and style.

Despite his slender frame and coquettish demeanour, he was hardy and doughty; he kept his first bout of cancer last year a secret, driving himself to the hospital on his motor-scooter for chemotherapy. He cheerfully dug his own grave in the garden of his cottage in Wales, where he was laid to rest beside his partner of 46 years, the sociologist George Goetschius, who died in 2006.

Donald Howarth, born November 5 1931, died March 24 2020