Roy Smiles


Roy Smiles is an English playwright and singer-songwriter from west London. He is also an occasional actor.
Smiles has written twenty six theatre plays, the best known of which is Kurt and Sid, a 2009 London West End production about the fictional meeting of Sid Vicious and Kurt Cobain. He has released seven albums of self-penned songs.

Career

His first play staged in 1992 at the Battersea Arts Centre, Schmucks was about a fictitious meeting between Groucho Marx and Lenny Bruce.
In 2002 he played the role of Itzak Heller, a Jewish collaborator, in Roman Polanski's The Pianist.
Smiles's stage and radio plays focus largely on biographical subjects such as Albert Camus, Evelyn Waugh, the Beyond The Fringe team, Arthur Miller/Marilyn Monroe, George Orwell, Tony Hancock, Robert F. Kennedy, PG Woodhouse and the Enola Gay.
A number of his plays have debuted or transferred to theatres around the world, such as Pythonesque, the story of the Monty Python team, which opened in South Africa before moving to Edinburgh as part of the Fringe Festival. Ying Tong - A Walk With The Goons, the story of Spike Milligan's nervous breakdown whilst writing The Goon Show, was staged at West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2004, transferring the following year to the New Ambassadors Theatre in London's West End before touring the US, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
Six of his plays have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Year Of The Rat, Ying Tong, Pythonesque and Kurt & Sid are published by Oberon Books. Ten Plays by Roy Smiles was published by Oberon Books in 2018.

Plays