Stephen Lowe (playwright)

He has had plays produced by the Royal Court, Royal Shakespeare Company, Riverside Studios, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Hampstead Theatre, Joint Stock; and at regional theatres across the country including Scarborough Theatre in the Round, Sheffield Crucible, Liverpool Playhouse, Derby Playhouse, Birmingham Rep, Salisbury Playhouse and Plymouth Theatre Royal. A two-man adaptation by Townsend Productions of his play The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists toured throughout the country in 2011 to 2013 and again in 2015.

Many of his plays were first produced in his home-town at Nottingham Playhouse, at Lakeside Arts Centre or by Lowe’s own company, Meeting Ground Theatre Company. Lowe moved back to Nottingham in 1985 to start Meeting Ground, with a group including his wife Tanya Myers. In February 2017, a revival of Touched was staged at Nottingham Playhouse, starring Vicky McClure. This new production celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the original production at the same theatre.

Lowe was writer in residence at Riverside Studios from 1982 to 1984, and he has led numerous theatre and writing workshops, including at the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, BBC Television, the Arvon Foundation, Liverpool Playhouse, Nottingham Playhouse and Riverside Studios. He has lectured at Dartington College of Arts, Birmingham University (on the MA in Playwriting Studies programme), Nottingham Trent University, Charles University in Prague and at the Performance Art Academy in Sofia. Lowe has been a member of various theatre boards and advisory panels, including Great Eastern Stage Company. He was on the council of Arts Council England, and was Chair of Arts Council England - East Midlands from 2004 to 2010.

In the 1980s, Lowe edited two anthologies of peace plays for Methuen. The first volume was of plays by British playwrights, including Deborah Levy, Adrian Mitchell, and Lowe himself (Keeping Body and Soul Together). It was published in 1985 during a period of increased tension towards the end of the Cold War, and Lowe's introduction quoted from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Nobel acceptance speech, "we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of a utopia of a very different kind." The second volume, published in 1990, came out of the new era of glasnost and a thaw in relations between the two superpowers. For this volume Lowe selected plays by two American playwrights, Arthur Kopit and Richard Stayton; and by two Russian playwrights, Fyodor Burlatsky, a former adviser to Khrushchev and Gorbachev, and Mikhail Bulgakov.

Lowe's play Touched was joint winner of the George Devine Award in 1977, and he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Nottingham in July 2011. In July 2015, Nottingham Express Transit named one of their new trams "Stephen Lowe" in his honour.

After university, Lowe worked in various jobs while writing, including part-time lecturer, clerk, hospital receptionist, newspaper distributor, advertising manager, housepainter, barman and civil servant. While working as a part-time shepherd in the Yorkshire Dales, he was commissioned by Alan Ayckbourn to write a comedy double-bill, Comic Pictures, and joined his Scarborough Theatre in the Round company as an actor and writer. Ayckbourn produced Comic Pictures in 1976.

Lowe took his mother's maiden name as a professional identity in 1976, when he joined Ayckbourn's company.

Lowe's plays have dealt with subjects ranging from the takeover of Tibet by the Chinese People's Liberation Army in 1959 (Tibetan Inroads) to a dying DH Lawrence trying find a publisher for Lady Chatterley (Empty Bed Blues); from Donald McGill postcards (Cards and Kisses on the Bottom) to Dr John Dee (The Alchemical Wedding). His best known plays are Touched, about a group of working-class women in Nottingham at the end of the second world war; The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, about a group of house-painters in 1906 (adapted from the novel by Robert Tressell); and Old Big ‘Ead in the Spirit of the Man, in which football hero Brian Clough comes back from the dead to inspire a playwright working on his latest play.

Stephen Lowe (born December 1947) is an English playwright and director.