Robert Lord (playwright)
Robert Lord was the first New Zealand professional playwright, and the first New Zealand playwright to have plays produced abroad since Merton Hodge in the 1930s.
He was born in Rotorua, and attended Southland Boys' High School and then the University of Otago and Victoria University of Wellington. In 1969 he won the Katherine Mansfield Young Writers Award, and in 1974 travelled to New York City on an Arts Council travel bursary, where he lived until returning in 1987 to take up the Robert Burns Fellowship in Dunedin. He was involved with several New Zealand theatres, Mercury Theatre, Auckland ; Circa Theatre and Downstage Theatre, Wellington; and Fortune Theatre, Dunedin.
His first full-length play was It Isn’t Cricket, then Meeting Place Well Hung, Heroes and Butterflies, Glitter and Spit High as a Kite and Balance of Payments, Country Cops and The Affair. Unfamiliar Steps was later called Bert and Maisie, and was adapted for television in 1988. His Joyful and Triumphant toured in Australia in 1992 after his death from cancer; it tells the Bishop family story over 40 years in a series of Christmas Day scenes. He also wrote one-act plays, radio plays and screenplays. His plays have been produced or published in New Zealand, Australia and the United States.
He died in 1992 from HIV/AIDS complications.
