James Martin Charlton
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James Martin Charlton is a English playwright and theatre director. He was born in Romford, Greater London, United Kingdom in 1966.
His play Fat Souls won the 1992 International Playwriting Festival at Warehouse Theatre, Croydon, where it premiered in 1993. Fat Souls and the plays which followed it - Groping in the Dark and Coming Up - are unusual in contemporary theatre in their use of verse dialogue, soliloquies, emblematic characterisation and Biblical imagery, all strapped to contemporary stories. The radical, non-conformist spiritual/anarchist strain in his writing reached fulfillment in Divine Vision, a biographical play about the relationship between William Blake and his patron, William Hayley, and a stage adaptation of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress.
In 2001, his play ecstasy + GRACE hit national newspaper headlines, controversy and critical opprobrium due to its graphic, uncompromising portrait of paedophilia and moral degeneracy. Recent work has seen a shift towards forms of social comedy critiquing bourgeois values - I Really Must be Getting Off is a contemporary gay version of the country house play.
Since 1996, Charlton has been Artistic Director of Friendly Fire Productions. Friendly Fire's productions include Gob by Jim Kenworth starring ex-Take That star Jason Orange at The King's Head Theatre in 1999, which Charlton directed. He has also directed shows with casts of prisoners at HMP Maidstone, including The Who's Tommy.
He currently lectures in Scriptwriting at Middlesex University on their Creative Writing programme.
[edit] Plays
- What Are Neighbours For? (Fallen Angel, 1985)
- Straight to the Top (Etcetera Theatre, 1988)
- More About the Language of Love (New Copenhagen, 1991)
- Fat Souls (Warehouse Theatre, 1993)
- The World & his Wife (White Bear Theatre, 1995)
- Groping in the Dark (Warehouse Theatre/Mermaid Theatre, 1996)
- Coming Up (Warehouse Theatre, 1997)
- Divine Vision (Swedenborg Hall, 2000)
- The Pilgrim's Progress (after Bunyan) (Royal Shakespeare Company commission, 2000)
- ecstacy + GRACE (Finborough Theatre, 2001)
- Desires of Frankenstein (Open Air Theatre, 2001/Pleasance Theatre Edinburgh, 2002)
- I Really Must Be Getting Off (White Bear Theatre, 2005)
- Whatever (Soho Theatre workshop, 2005)
