PLAYWRIGHT, painter, screenwriter, costume and set designer, children’s author. John Byrne’s CV reads like a list of the occupations of the inhabitants of an unusually talented village, rather than the work of just one person.
Byrne’s dramatic writing includes the TV favourites Tutti Frutti and Your Cheatin’ Heart, and evergreen play series The Slab Boys (inspired by his time, as a young man, grinding paint in the soul-destroying “slab room” of carpet maker AF Stoddard and Co in the late-1950s and 1960s). His extraordinary body of visual art is as breathtakingly accomplished as it is stunningly diverse.
