Maureen Lawrence
Writer and award winning playwright, Maureen
Lawrence, lectured at Bradford & Ilkey College in
the 1990s.
“My connection with Bradford College began when
the decision to close the Ilkley campus led to a
staffing shortage. As a local author and lecturer I was
invited to help out with the final cohort of humanities
students. In an eerily empty building these students,
many of them mature and strongly committed to
learning, became a closely knit and rewarding group.
I enjoyed these 2 years and they had a significant
impact on my own writing career, because the gifted
theatre director Annie Castledine had also been
drafted in to work alongside teacher, writer and
director, Warwick Dobson. The meeting with Annie
Castledine led to my first play Tokens of Affection,
which was the start of my work as a playwright. This
play received its first airing in a rehearsed reading
at the Ilkley Literature Festival and went on to tour
throughout the north.
Other commissions followed, including the highly
acclaimed Father’s Day, (West Yorkshire Playhouse);
Resurrection, which won the LWT Plays on Stage
Award; Paine’s Plough and Real Writing,
commissioned by Corin Redgrave for Moving Theatre.
This was followed at Birmingham Rep by Twins, a
drama dealing with the disastrous impact of debt.
The Lie of the Land, a play concerned with rural
issues was commissioned and toured nationally by
Charivari in 1995. A companion piece New Life was
written for Blaize during the aftermath of the foot and
mouth crisis.
“Meanwhile the association with Warwick Dobson
was also fruitful. This led to an interest in Theatre in
Education. I have devised and written many plays for
young people with TIE companies and students,
including a version of Woyzek at Northumbria
University and many plays at the Duke’s Theatre,
Lancaster and Theatre Powys. Feed My People was
written for Blaize and performed by children for the
Queen at Beverley Minster. My most recent piece Once a Lady is based on the memoirs of Charlotte
Deans, an actress, who lived and toured in the north
during the nineteenth century.
A belated convert to theatre, I see drama as a
great forum for ideas, finding in plays a form of
communication more direct and satisfying than the
fiction I wrote earlier, though the stimulus of teaching
that final cohort of students did provoke me into
writing one more book A Telling And A Keeping,
during a most instructive and memorable spell of
teaching at Bradford College.”
Maureen’s husband Brian worked at Ilkley College
from 1971. He became Head of Library and Learning
and worked for Bradford College until 1997.
Photograph supplied by Maureen Lawrence