Michael Hastings

Michael Gerald Hastings (2 September 1938 – 19 November 2011) was a British playwright, screenwriter, and occasional novelist and poet.

He is best known for his 1984 stage play and 1994 screenplay Tom & Viv, about the poet T.S. Eliot and his wife Vivienne Haigh-Wood.

Hastings was born in London, UK. His early plays – Don't Destroy Me (1956), Yes And After (1957) – reflected the influence of the Angry Young Men movement and his brief involvement with the circle surrounding Colin Wilson.

Hastings later enjoyed mainstream West End success with Gloo Joo (1978), a farce about a West Indian threatened with deportation from the United Kingdom, which won the Evening Standard Comedy of the Year Award in 1979. He wrote numerous stage plays, television screen plays, and in addition to the Tom & Viv film, scripts for two motion pictures, The American (1998) and The Nightcomers (1971, based on the Henry James novella The Turn of the Screw and starring Marlon Brando). Hastings also wrote two libretti for Michael Nyman: Man and Boy: Dada (2003, assisted by Victoria Hardie) and Love Counts (2005).

Hastings' 1950's play The Cutting of the Cloth saw its world premiere at the Southwark Playhouse in London, from 11 March till 4 April 2015. The cast were Alexis Caley, Andy de la Tour, James El-Sharawy, Paul Rider and Abigail Thaw, directed by Tricia Thorns.

Hastings published his first novel, The Game in 1957, followed by The Frauds. His 1970 novel Tussy Is Me – about Eleanor Marx – won him the Somerset Maugham Award. As a poet, he published one collection, Love Me, Lambeth, and Other Poems, in 1961, and his work appeared in Michael Horovitz's 1969 anthology Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain.

Hastings died aged 73 on 19 November 2011.