English writer and director Neil Bartlett was born in December 1958. Born in Chichester, West Sussex, he showed an early interest in theatre, establishing The 1982 Theatre Company and collaborating in street theare with actor Simon McBurney. In 1983, he worked for a community theatre company, helping stage and tour Louise Parker Kelley’s Anti Body, the first play produced in Britain to address the HIV/AIDS crisis. During the 1985, he worked with Burney’s company Theatre de Complicité, More Bigger Snacks Now, winning the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival. In 1988, he co-founded the experimental theatre company Gloria, staging productions in churches, lecture theatres and Victorian music halls, and casting drag performers Bette Bourne and Regina Fong alongside established actors. In 1994, he was appointed artistic director of the Lyric Hammersmith theatre in London, staging radical productions of plays by Shakespeare, Marivaux, Molière, Terence Rattigan and Jean Genet and a celebrated stage adaptation of Joseph Losey‘s film The Servant. Openly gay since forever and a committed activist, he helped organise London’s first International AIDS Day event in 1987, and joined protests of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher‘s anti-gay Section 28 law. His published works include Who Was That Man?, a study of playwright Oscar Wilde, and the queer-themed novels Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall, Mr. Clive and Mr. Page, Skin Lane, The Disappearance Boy and Address Book. His recent work includes a marathon performance of Wilde’s poem De Profundis, performed in Reading Jail, where Wilde had been imprisoned; and scripting a West End stage production of Virginia Woolf‘s novel Orlando starring Emma Corrin. Bartlett lives in London with his long-term partner James Gardiner.