Rhys Adrian

Rhys Adrian
Born	28 February 1928 (London, England)
Died	8 February 1990 (London, England)
Occupation	playwright, screenwriter
Nationality	British
Genre	Drama
Notable awards	Prix Italia: Evelyn (1969) Giles Cooper Award: Watching the Plays Together (1982) Outpatient (1985)

Rhys Adrian Griffiths (28 February 1928 – 8 February 1990) was a British playwright and screenwriter. He is best known for his radio plays, which are characterised by their emphasis upon dialogue rather than narrative.

Rhys Adrian worked in stage management before becoming a writer, contributing material to summer shows, revues, pantomimes and West End musicals. His first radio play, The Man on the Gate, was broadcast by the BBC Home Service in November 1956. By the early 1960s he was beginning to develop the dramatic style that would become a hallmark of his subsequent work. A Nice Clean Sheet of Paper (1964) features a talkative and condescending job interviewer (played by Donald Wolfit) whose attempts to communicate with an unresponsive applicant (John Wood) drive him to incoherent blathering.

Evelyn (1969), which starred Ian Richardson and Pauline Collins as a couple trapped in an extra-marital and over-crowded affair, won the RAI Prize for Literary and Dramatic Programmes at the Prix Italia and was later adapted for television. Buffet (1976) saw Richard Briers playing a borderline alcoholic city gent unwinding at a railway buffet at the end of a long and exhausting day. In an introduction to the broadcast, John Tydeman, then head of Radio 4 drama, and the producer of 27 of Adrian's plays, paid tribute to the author – referring to him as "one of the great unknown British playwrights [...] very much a language man rather than a man who used whizzy, 'show-offy' radio."

1982's Watching the Plays Together was one of Adrian's most experimental works. Consisting largely of a conversation between a middle-aged married couple troubled by the trend towards social realism in television drama, the play won the Giles Cooper Award for outstanding writing for radio. As a mark of his status as a playwright, Adrian's plays throughout the 1980s boasted casts made up of distinguished actors – including, amongst others, John Gielgud (Passing Time; 1983), Michael Aldridge (Outpatient; 1985) and Peter Vaughn (Toytown; 1987). His last radio play, Upended, was broadcast in 1988.

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