Anthony McCarten

Anthony McCarten, is a commercially successful playwright, also writing poetry and fiction. He was born in New Plymouth. His first play was INVITATION TO A SECOND CLASS CARRIAGE (Depot Theatre, Wellington, 1984). His next, YELLOW CANARY MAZURKA, was selected for the 1986 New Zealand Playwrights’ Workshop and premièred the following year at Circa in Wellington. At the workshop McCarten met Stephen Sinclair and, in six weeks in 1987, they wrote LADIES’ NIGHT, a play about male strippers, which opened at Mercury in December of that year and went on to become the most commercially successful play in New Zealand’s theatre history. It has been translated into six languages and was the most successful touring production in Britain between 1990 and 1994. Subsequent plays have been PIGEON ENGLISH (Playwrights’ Workshop, 1988, Depot Theatre, 1989), WEED (Circa, 1990), VIA SATELLITE (Circa, 1991, and the winner of the ‘NZ Listener Best Play and Wellington Theatre Critics’ Best Production awards for 1991), HANG ON A MINUTE, MATE, an adaptation from a series of novels by Barry Crump (Downstage, 1992), LET’S SPEND THE NIGHT TOGETHER (Bats, 1994, and afterwards toured nationally), FILTH (Failed in London, Try Hong Kong) (Circa, 1995) and FOUR CITIES (Los Angeles, 1996). As well as LADIES’ NIGHT, McCarten has co-written with Stephen Sinclair LADIES’ NIGHT 2 (which relates the fortunes of the characters five years on) and LEGLESS. He has directed two short films: NOCTURNE IN A ROOM (1992) and FLUFF (1995) and has published a short story collection, A MODEST APOCALYPSE (1991), and a number of poems.