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From: The Hudson Review
Date: 20030701
Author:Hornby, Richard

PLAYWRITING IS NOT A YOUNG PERSON'S PROFESSION. Aeschylus was around seventy when he wrote the Oresteia, as was Sophocles when he wrote Oedipus Tyrannus. Shakespeare, more precocious, began writing plays in his mid-twenties, but the truly great ones came at least a decade later. Ibsen made his name with A Doll's House, his sixteenth play, written at the age of forty-nine. The usual explanation for the slow development is that it takes time for writers to learn the practicalities of the theatre, from physical constraints like keeping track of characters and getting them on and off stage, to ...

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