Taking the anxieties of middle-class, suburban England as his subject, Peter Nichols has fashioned a series of very popular plays which at their best comment on reality by distorting it through comic and sometimes flamboyant dramatic techniques. He comes to the stage by way of television, for which he had written more than a dozen scripts, many of them highly successful, before he made the leap to legitimate theater.

Born in Bristol, Peter Richard Nichols is the son of Richard George and Violet Annie Poole Nichols. He was educated from 1936 to 1944 at Bristol Grammar School and attended Bristol Old Vic Theatre School from 1948 to 1950. Nichols enrolled at Trent Park Teachers' Training College in 1955, where he studied until 1957. Two years later, he married Thelma Reed, and the couple had four children, one of whom has since died.

His work for the BBC and commercial television should not be lightly...