Bonnie Greer, playwright and cultural critic, dies aged 77

Writer and critic who became known for her sharp, composed appearances on TV shows such as Late Review and Question TimeThe writing and broadcasting of Bonnie Greer, who has died aged 77, were driven by divided perspectives. Her technical experience across an unusual range of genres – drama, fiction, biography, memoir, documentary – informed her work as a wry and lively critic, especially on the late-night BBC2 cultural programmes Late Review and Newsnight Review from the 1990s onwards.And, having spent the first half of her life in the US and the second in the UK, she was also perfectly positioned – in an era when British writers, movie-makers and artists were making much work about and for America – to adjudicate on such creative duality, as well as the escalating Americanisation of British politics. Another asset was her connections: reviewing a David Mamet play or a Madonna album, she had worked with the former in Chicago theatre and met the latter as a young music wannabe in a Manhattan apartment share. Continue reading...

Playwright was an unusual mix of originality and authority and in high demand as a cultural criticBonnie Greer, who has died at the age of 77, moved to the UK from New York in 1986. She grew up in Chicago, had six siblings, her father worked in a factory and her mother “kept house”, she said once - in a tone so elegantly ominous, she conjured an image of a woman holding up a full dwelling with seven children in it, with her bare hands. Greer was ambitious and, academically, a high flyer, but abandoned her law degree, facing baked-in sexism from professors. Yet, since she started writing plays aged nine, arguably she was just hastening a creative career that was inevitable.The Actors Studio was what drew her to the West Village in Manhattan in the late 70s, and she was there at the height of the Aids crisis, a brutal time of mass bereavements and poisonous prejudice. She lost around 35 of her friends, and later told the Sunday Times: “I owe those people my life. If I hadn’t met my gay friends I would be a suburban SUV-driving granny. They taught me the value of insurrection and fun. Nearly 30 years on, I’m still that 25-year-old, on top of some bar, in one of those vintage dresses, dancing with those guys.” But when she arrived, touring, at the Edinburgh Festival, it felt like a release, from the “shadow of death”, and a New York theatre scene bereft of its heart. She stayed in the UK permanently. Continue reading...