Robert Bolt began his career in drama as a writer of radio plays for the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), starting in 1953 with The Master, a play about the wandering scholars of the Middle Ages. He wrote sixteen scripts for the BBC, including eight for children. The first version of A Man for All Seasons was broadcast as a radio drama in 1954, and his very first production on the legitimate stage, The Last of the Wine, originated as a radio script a year earlier.

Bolt’s most noteworthy achievements outside the legitimate theater, however, were as a screenwriter. He worked with the renowned British director David Lean on Lawrence of Arabia, creating a screenplay based on T. E. Lawrence’s own writings. The film received the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1962, and Bolt’s scenario received a special award from the British Film Academy. His adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, another script written for Lean, won an Oscar for the Best Screenplay of 1965, an honor repeated in 1966 when Bolt adapted his own play, A Man for All Seasons (directed by Fred Zinnemann). The film version also earned for Bolt the British Film Academy Award and the New York Film Critics Circle Award in 1966. His next project was an original treatment of Ryan’s Daughter for Lean in 1970. In 1972, he wrote and directed Lady Caroline Lamb, based on the life of the mistress of George Gordon, Lord Byron, the famous English poet.

In the 1980’s, Bolt concentrated on screenplays, teleplays, and adaptations, notably The Mission (1986; starring Robert De Niro), Nostromo (an adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel, with Christopher Hampton, which was not completed), and Without Warning (1991), based on the life of James Brady, the press secretary to President Ronald Reagan who was disabled by a would-be presidential assassin’s bullet in 1981.

Robert Bolt earned the reputation of being a serious dramatist whose sense of stagecraft made him popular with theater audiences. Critics also recognized his talent for structure and his concern with language from the time of his appearance in the West End theaters of London with Flowering Cherry in 1957. This play, a popular and critical success during its 435 performances at the Haymarket Theatre, won for him the Evening Standard Drama Award for Most Promising Playwright of that year. Although Bolt launched his career in the heyday of the Angry Young Men, when playwrights as diverse as John Osborne, Harold Pinter, John Arden, and Arnold Wesker challenged the then reigning conventions of English theater, he was never associated with the avant-garde. In fact, Bolt deliberately rejected many features of the new drama while responding to those influences that he could accommodate to his traditional aesthetic.

Bolt’s own statements about his approach to his art reflected his conviction that conventional dramatic structure, with a clearly articulated plot and an organic unity, not only satisfied the legitimate expectations of the audience but also provided an effective vehicle “for conveying delicate but immediate insights.” He compared highly conventional theater, “where both sides of the footlights understand thoroughly what’s going on,” to a taut drumskin that resounds at the lightest tap. “Take away these conventions and you find yourself with a slack drumskin; you’ve got to jump up and down on it before you get even the slightest tinkle.” Bolt also maintained that the slice-of-life dramatists who allow the audience to supply play endings use the theater “as a therapeutic rather than dramatic medium.”

Bolt’s earliest dramas were traditional well-crafted plays, largely naturalistic in approach, with a fourth-wall style of dramaturgy. Even as early as Flowering Cherry , however,...