Michael Kustow, playwright, writer, producer and avant-gardist, has been a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Associate Director of the National Theatre, Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Channel 4’s Arts Commissioning Editor. Since 1990, he has been an independent writer and producer, notably writing the biography of Peter Brook, producing two feature films, directed by Julien Temple and Tony Harrison, and associate producing Tantalus, a nine-hour epic on the Trojan War and the Greek myths, written by John  Barton and directed by Sir Peter Hall. 

This year, having nurtured the plays of others, he has turned to writing plays himself. West Bank shows how the war against terrorism decimates an English university, while his latest play, Honey From The Carcass, displays the extreme passions and antagonisms that erupt in a Jewish family after the death of its mother, and links them to the ferocious conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East. Discussions about the production of these plays are under way.

He has written five books - The Book of US (Calder and Boyars, 1968), a study of Peter Brook’s theatre-piece about the Vietnam War; Tank, An Autobiographical Fiction (Cape, 1975); One in Four (Chatto and Windus, 1987), an account of a year working in Channel Four Television; and theatre@risk (Methuen 2000), a defence of theatre in the digital  age.

His most recent book, the authorized biography of Peter Brook  (Bloomsbury) brings together his experiences in theatre in England, France and America, and is based on a friendship and collaboration with Brook of more than forty years. Published to coincide with Brook’s eightieth birthday, it was glowingly reviewed: ‘A bountifully detailed record of Brook’s marvellously driven life,’ wrote Peter Shaffer, ‘expertly charted, and described with devotion. It is a wondrous story’; ‘I defy anyone to read the book and not come away thinking better of the theatre, its scope, its passion, its contribution,’ wrote Simon Callow.

Kustow is now working with photographer Simon Annand on The Half, a big illustrated book about actors in their dressing-rooms during the last half-hour before they go on stage, which Faber will publish in 2008. 

As a director and deviser, he staged a cabaret of Brecht’s poems and Hanns Eisler’s songs, with Jane Asher and Gawn Grainger, in the National’s Cottesloe Theatre. At the Queen Elizabeth Hall, he directed his translation of Stravinsky and Ramuz’s The Soldier’s Tale, starring Claire Bloom, Pinchas Zukerman, Wayne Sleep and Maina Gielgud.

He has begun work on A Passage from India, ‘an intimate epic’ about his life in 2006/7.