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James David Rudkin is an English playwright of Northern Irish descent. Coming from a family of strict evangelical Christians, Rudkin was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham and read Mods and Greats at St Catherine's College, Oxford. Beginning to write during national service in the Royal Corps of Signals, Rudkin taught Latin, Greek and music at North Bromsgrove High School in Worcestershire until 1964, while also directing amateur theatre productions.
Following the success of his first play Afore Night Come, Rudkin translated works by Aeschylus, Roger Vitrac, the libretto of Schoenberg's Moses and Aaron, and wrote the book to the Western Theatre Ballet's Sun into Darkness and the libretto for Gordon Crosse's comic opera, The Grace of Todd.
Rudkin's major works for the stage include Ashes, The Sons of Light, The Triumph of Death and The Saxon Shore. His associations with the RSC also led him to translate the Hippolytus of Euripides for the company in 1978, having translated the author's Hecuba for radio three years previously.
He has written for television, including The Stone Dance, Children Playing, House of Character, Blodwen, Home from Rachel's Marriage, Bypass, Atrocity, the Alan Clarke-directed Penda's Fen, and Artemis 81; for radio, including No Accounting for Taste, Gear Change, Cries from Casement as His Bones are Brought to Dublin; and for cinema, including François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451.
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