Howard Brenton's Revenge (Royal Court, 1969) is a companion to his better-known Christie in Love, and portrays the revenge of the arch-criminal, Eastender Adam Hepple, on Assistant Commissioner of Police McLeish. The police and criminals are partial mirror images of one another, sharing moral ambiguity amid a Jacobean sense of a decadent and corrupt society – by the end of the play, everyone has died violently. The play's ethos is anarchist, and its sense of a decadent society suggests that past traditions and customary ways of thinking are effectively dead.
Originally billed as a “Romantic Melodrama in the Theatre Upstairs”, Revenge opened on 2 September 1969. Similarities have been drawn between the play's central character, Adam Hepple, and King Lear; both plays open with a powerful figure giving up a kingdom only to find their...
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Citation: Foakes, Ian. "Revenge". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 26 April 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=16760, accessed 05 December 2025.]
