Robert Lord (playwright)

Lord's home in Titan Street, Dunedin, was left in trust as a rent-free writer’s residence. Administered by the Robert Lord Writers Cottage Trust, it hosted its first writers in residence in 2003. Lord has a plaque on the Dunedin Writers' Walk, featuring a quote from a letter to his mother.

The play Joyful and Triumphant was commissioned by Circa Theatre and premiered there as part of the New Zealand Festival programme in 1992, following which it toured Australia. Lord died just before it opened so never got to see it on stage. In 1992 Joyful and Triumphant received the following Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards: Production of the Year, Director of the Year, and New Zealand Playwright of the Year. The play tells a story about a small-town New Zealand family over 40 years in a series of Christmas Day scenes. Circa Theatre chose Joyful and Triumpant as part of their 40th anniversary celebrations.

Lord died in 1992, aged 46, from cancer and HIV/AIDS complications.

In 1987 he returned to New Zealand to take up the Robert Burns Fellowship in Dunedin. He was involved with several New Zealand theatres during his career: Mercury Theatre, Auckland (writer-in-residence, 1974); Circa Theatre and Downstage Theatre, Wellington; and Fortune Theatre, Dunedin (writer-in-residence, 1990).

In 1974 Lord travelled to New York City on an Arts Council travel bursary, and he stayed for several years. He signed with the New York agent Gilbert Parker from the William Morris Agency. Plays from the 1980s include High As a Kite (premiered at Downstage, a.k.a. The Kite Play), Country Cops, this is a revision of Well Hung (1985) and was presented at Trinity Square Repertory in New York. Unfamiliar Steps (1983) was later called Bert and Maisy and was adapted for television in 1988. Robert Lord directed the premiere co-operative production of The Affair at the Globe Theatre, Dunedin, in 1987. Glorious Ruins was presented at Circa Theatre in Wellington in April 1991 and at the Fortune Theatre, Dunedin, in June of that year. His play The Travelling Squirrel is based in New York and was written in 1987 although not performed in a New Zealand mainstage theatre until 2015. China Wars was presented in a co-operative production staged at the Globe Theatre in Dunedin in 1988 and at Bats Theatre in Wellington in 2002. Broken Circle, a one-act play, received its world premiere at Studio 77 in Wellington in 2004.

For a period of time Lord worked backstage at Downstage Theatre, was teaching school, studying drama and writing plays at night. Lord's first full-length play was It Isn’t Cricket (1971) and it was selected for the inaugural Australian National Playwrights Conference in 1973 which he attended. Following up from that event alongside Nonnita Rees, Judy Russell and Ian Fraser he formed Playmarket to increase the number of plays by New Zealand writers available for New Zealand theatres.

Victoria University started a Drama Department in 1970 which Lord attended at age 25, and his lecturer recounts meeting Lord for the first time:

Lord was educated at three tertiary institutions. First the University of Otago, then Victoria University of Wellington (1965–68) and after that he gained his teaching qualification at Wellington Teachers College. In 1969, he won the Katherine Mansfield Young Writers Award. At this time in New Zealand professional theatre in New Zealand was just beginning, and in Wellington where Lord was, Downstage Theatre had opened in 1964 and Unity Theatre was active.

Robert Lord (18 July 1945 – 7 January 1992) was the first New Zealand professional playwright, and one of the first New Zealand playwrights to have plays produced abroad since Merton Hodge in the 1930s (following Bruce Mason and James K. Baxter).

Born in Rotorua in 1945, to parents Richard and Bebe Lord. He has an older brother. His father's job took the family around the country and they lived in various cities in New Zealand while he was growing up including Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, Christchurch and Invercargill. Lord attended schools in Auckland, Hamilton and Southland Boys' High School in Invercargill.