Playwright
William Douglas Home wrote some 50 plays, most of them comedies in an upper class setting.
"In the space of a month or two after his release he wrote two plays which were successful in London in 1947. The first Now Barabbas was based on his experience in gaol and in the latter some of the characters were drawn from his family."
Although Douglas Home was a prolific playwright, his works have neither the depth nor the durability of such near contemporaries as Rattigan or Coward. However, his play The Reluctant Debutante has been adapted twice into film. The first film, made in 1958, retained the same title and featured Rex Harrison and Sandra Dee with a screenplay by the playwright himself. The second was released in 2003, under the title What a Girl Wants, starring Amanda Bynes, Colin Firth and Kelly Preston. The remake features a hereditary peer in the House of Lords who disclaims his title in order to stand for election to the House of Commons; Alec Douglas Home was one of the first to do that after the enacting of the Peerage Act 1963.
As part of the 1975 centennial season of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, a specially-written curtain raiser by Douglas Home, called Dramatic Licence, was played by Peter Pratt as Richard D'Oyly Carte, Kenneth Sandford as W.S. Gilbert and John Ayldon as Arthur Sullivan, in which Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte plan the birth of Trial by Jury in 1875.
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Famous quotes containing the word playwright:
“A playwright ... is ... the litmus paper of the arts. He’s got to be, because if he isn’t working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he’s great.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)
“If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)