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Michael Hastings was brought up by his mother in Brixton in a local authority flat. He went to a number of schools in south London, then at fifteen he took up an apprenticeship in bespoke tailoring. He had ambitions to be a sportsman and he showed promise in boxing and middle distance races, and had dreams of becoming a sports coach. He competed in the All England Boys’ Athletics Championship, and was briefly a member of the Caius Amateur Boys’ Boxing Club. For a time in South London he maintained early friendships with the British welter weight boxing champion Peter Waterman, and the athlete Gordon Pirie. Eventually, all of this had to give way to a voracious love of live plays and most of his spare time and wages went on cheapest seats and long walks home across the city at night. Between sixteen and seventeen, Michael showed his own first plays to George Devine at the Royal Court Theatre, and Devine offered him a starting wage as an actor/writer at the theatre. On Friday mornings, Hastings regularly found himself in a line for his wage packet beside the eighty year old Shavian actor Esme Percy and the rest of the company. By twenty, Michael had three plays performed in London and New York, and although clearly gifted with a love for live performance, he remained a self-taught book junky.

His mother Marie was a pretty woman who danced in amateur ballroom formation teams. She worked on counters in a large department store and competed against Swears&Wells and Selfridges in formation dance competitions. Marie and her son often joined cousins at Frinton Sands for holidays. They shared drafty wooden chalets and played on broad flat sand banks. One summer the bad weather was unforgivable. Michael refused to step into the cold sea. Instead, he went back to the chalet and boiled a kettle of hot water. He took the kettle back to the water’s edge and poured the boiling water into the sea. His cousins watched in silence. Michael stood in the sea up to his ankles with a stoic stubborn face. Marie had a darker side to her dancing temperament. It was a pronounced disappointment in men. Michael’s father, Gerry, was something of an impecunious playboy – charming, impeccably dressed and always absent. He acquired a second-hand sports car and believed he resembled the movie star Ronald Colman. Michael Hastings has one clear memory of his father. Gerry held the four year old boy and insisted he stub a lighted cigarette out on the boy’s knee. His father claimed it was a ‘painless’ RAF induction test to prove a man won’t   scream. But Gerry hardly knew his own son. And he made no attempt to hide the fact he wanted out of the marriage.

After Gerry died in a plane crash over Cologne, Marie fell in love with a US Army officer, Franklin Todd, from Cincinnati, Ohio. He promised her he’d take mother and son back to Ohio for good. He insisted he was divorced. Todd went home and took up a job in insurance sales. Marie wrote to him twice a week for two years. He wrote her back as much. With as many assurances. Eventually, on a Monday, Marie received a letter from lawyers in Ohio. The lawyers represented Mrs F Todd, and her children. The letter warned Marie if she continued to write to her husband then legal action would be taken against her. Marie Hastings had a mental breakdown. She left her job and stayed for several weeks at a clinic. Michael was farmed out to his grandparents. When Marie returned, she never spoke about it. The boy remembers she incinerated an American fur coat on a nearby bomb site. And in a locked room she tore up photographs and bundles of air-mail letters on flimsy blue note-paper.

Michael left home at seventeen and rented a room at 46, Brixton Hill. His landlady, Mrs Ball, took in actors who returned from the coast in the winter. With some money saved from a theatre production, Michael sailed to New York and stayed a year. He met a number of writers, including William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Edith Sitwell and Gore Vidal; but it soon became clear to him that the old world of Europe, still emerging from war and a destroyed world, was going to develop and change more rapidly than the isolated ‘Roman Empire’ of America.   With help from two retired English teachers, the novelist Edward Upward and A. Scott, Michael found an antipathy towards the Modernist movement, and in his own mind created a bond with clarity and cleanliness in new writing. There was a certain thread in literature which moved from Robert Browning to Rupert Brooke to W H Auden and to Carol Ann Duffy. Between the early discovery of Morse code and the invention of the telegram, history has moved towards a desire for open knowledge between all races of Mankind. Culture as a mandarin activity belongs only in a narrow focus.

Michael’s plays have changed from confessional memories to broader themes – plays set in Africa and Brazil, plays set in British/Jamaican and Irish expatriate families, plays set in Ethiopia and Texas, plays set in the world of pensions and UK fascism, and plays set on dance floors and in the centre of a carnival; there is a restlessness in all his work, as if it is impossible to repeat himself. And if eventually there is a theatre willing to take it on, Hastings is attempting a three-part epic dream play about Marcus Garvey and his mythic place in history.

There remains something disquieting about Michael Hastings’ determination never to go back over old ground. He has lived abroad in Brazil and east Africa and Spain for extensive stays, and there are journeys to Columbia and Bolivia and the Caribbean. His own personal books to travel with include Malcolm Lowry, Carol Ann Duffy, Theodore Roethke, Andre Malraux, and Walter Benjamin. He has said in a number of interviews he believes all art will be judged harshly by the years unless it also teaches. And there is a desire to lose the authorial signature, as if he’d be altogether happier with no identifiable name. He has been married for some years to Victoria Hardie, the playwright and librettist (US GOOD GIRLS, SLEEPING NIGHTIE; opera – FACING GOYA, Michael Nyman/Victoria Hardie). There are times when Victoria has consistently put aside time and talent to help reshape Michael’s work. She has had a remarkable influence and critical eye on all his work-in-progress, wherever they live together.