Playwright best known for The Herbal Bed and his RSC collaborations with the director Bill Alexander
The playwright Peter Whelan, who has died aged 82, lived a full life before turning to the stage in his middle years. He became one of the Royal Shakespeare Company's most notable beneficiaries of a "good new plays in smaller venues" policy of the 1980s, a contemporary counterweight to the main business of Shakespeare on the big stage.
His best known work, The Herbal Bed (1996), starring Joseph Fiennes, Teresa Banham and David Tennant in the original production in the Other Place at Stratford-upon-Avon, was a scintillating retrieval of a case for sexual slander brought by Shakespeare's daughter, Susanna, against a neighbour, John Lane, who accused her of adulterously contracting venereal disease from a local haberdasher.
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