Though the playwright David Cregan, who has died aged 83, was never a name on Shaftesbury Avenue, he was a skilled and original dramatist who forsook the teaching profession to join the “second wave” of new writers at the Royal Court theatre in the mid-1960s. He later formed an association with the Orange Tree in Richmond upon Thames, south-west London, where the director Sam Walters produced 15 of his plays (eight of them premieres) over 30 years from 1975 to 2005.
Red-haired, amusing and affable, with a ready, open smile, Cregan said he was a socialist because “there is no other reasonable thing to be”. His plays reverberated with such 20th-century questions as the status of the individual in a community, the likelihood of material wealth leading to spiritual complacency, and the potential for improvement in the basic nature of man.
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