David Cregan is a playwright who shows the externally inspired ideas and moral compulsions of modern people in conflict with instinct and reality. Even though the spectacle of the collision is invariably comic, its result is often painful or violent. Cregan employs a rapid, episodic style, presenting characters in absurd situations, often of their own making. His work is literate, intelligent, but lacks resolution, appropriately perhaps for the dilemmas which he presents. He does not offer definite conclusions in his work; most of the issues are left open or are subsumed in cathartic violence.

David Appleton Quartus Cregan was born in the elegant Georgian spa of Buxton in Derbyshire. He was the fourth and youngest son of James Grattan Cregan, a prosperous shirt manufacturer of Ulster descent, and Gertrude Isabella Martha Fraser Cregan. Both of his parents were from a Congregationalist background; his father in particular instilled in...