Playwright Robert Bolt
The writer of A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS and his examinations of conscience
Live on stage at Lantern Theater Company March 10 through April 9, 2022, A Man for All Seasons was written by playwright Robert Bolt — a man with a lifelong love of history, a facility with teaching, and a deep empathy for people who maintain their sense of self despite overwhelming external pressure to change. All of these elements are crystallized in his character of Sir Thomas More, and they each reappear throughout Bolt’s career. In his introduction to A Man for All Seasons, Bolt called More “a man with an adamantine sense of his own self…He knew what area of himself he could yield to the encroachments of his enemies, and what to the encroachments of those he loved.” Throughout his career, Bolt asked his characters — and himself — what internal fortitude it takes to live that way.
Robert Bolt was born in 1924 in Cheshire, England, near Manchester. He worked in insurance as a teenager, then began studying history at Victoria University of Manchester. He put his studies on hold to serve in the Royal Air Force and the British army during World War II, then returned to school and earned an honors degree in history. After university, he taught English and history at a boarding school for nearly 10 years, and produced his first play: a nativity play for the students during the Christmas season.
His continued teaching while writing a number of radio plays for the BBC, mostly for children. His teaching career finally gave way to full-time writing when he was 33. His play The Flowering Cherry was produced in London’s West End in 1958 and on Broadway in 1959, and that success allowed him to pursue writing full time. Even greater acclaim swiftly followed when in 1960 he adapted for the stage a radio play he wrote six years earlier: A Man for All Seasons. The stage version was an enormous critical and commercial success in Britain, in the United States, and, in 1966, as a feature film, winning several awards in both mediums.
Despite his continuing success on both Broadway and the West End, Bolt is probably best known for his screenplays for film and television. He adapted A Man for All Seasons for the screen himself, and he also wrote the screenplays for the film classics Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, among others. In 1966 and 1967, he won back-to-back Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay for Doctor Zhivago and A Man for All Seasons.
Throughout his career, Bolt’s deep knowledge of history and his ability to clearly chart its applications to the present served him well. His work is often set in an historical moment with deep resonances for his own time—and for ours. Across stage and screen, his stories also often feature protagonists who finds themselves at odds with society and authorities. He examines the ways in which individuals try to maintain their sense of self in the face of powerful external pressures, and he asks his audience to consider how they might respond if their society or government demanded more from them than their conscience could yield.
Bolt himself was a real-life example of this. He came of age at a time when the urge for moral clarity was very strong — World War II, the Red Scare, and (most consequentially for Bolt) the nuclear arms race all demanded a firm stance and ethical action. A year after adapting A Man for All Seasons for the stage, Bolt was arrested as a member of the Committee of 100 while protesting nuclear proliferation. He took a one-month prison sentence rather than signing a document promising not to participate in further protests of that sort. But his principled stand delayed his script for Lawrence of Arabia, and in order to get him released early, the producer pushed back on his decision. When confronted with a dilemma similar to the one faced by Thomas More in his play, Bolt ultimately made the opposite choice amidst governmental and professional pressure: he signed. Bolt regretted his decision for the rest of his life, and that tension between self-interest and integrity continued to inform the explorations in his work.
This tension is part of what sets Bolt apart from his version of Thomas More. More tries simply to live by his conscience, not to be a crusader or a martyr. When included in the group of 1950s and 60s “Angry Young Men” of British theater, Bolt replied that he was “anxious rather than angry.” His work is full of this anxiety — full of people trying not to change the world but to stay true to themselves despite the crushing forces surrounding them. His Thomas More succeeds in saving his soul, but he loses his life. In his work, Bolt asks us what it is in ourselves that we need to preserve, what it would mean to lose it, and what we are willing to give up to protect it.
More on Lantern Searchlight: The Life of Sir Thomas More — The writer, public servant, saint, and complex historical figure behind A Man for All Seasons
Lantern Theater Company’s production of A Man for All Seasons is onstage March 10 through April 9, 2022, at Plays & Players Theatre. Visit our website for tickets and information.
