During the 1960s Ernest Macintyre was one of Sri Lanka's most prolific and successful playwrights in English. While he was in the Sri Lankan Air Force (1961-1967), and while Director of the drama school of Aquinas University College (1968-1969) and a UNESCO project officer (1969-1973) he established a performing group, Stage and Set, which produced international plays as well as his own. His early plays included 'The Full Circle of Caucasian Chalk' (1967), 'The President of the Old Boys' Club' (1970) and 'The Education of Miss Asia' (1971; later performed at the Playbox Theatre, Melbourne, 1979). 'Treated to the sophisticated craftsmanship of his productions and provoked by the thematic relevance of his plays, the expanding English-speaking audience [of Sri Lanka] developed a taste for political and social drama' (Frontline: India's National Magazine vol.6, no. 4 1999 (http://www.flonnet.com/fl1604/16040690.htm).
Macintyre emigrated to Australia in the 1970s and has since made a name for himself in the Australian theatre, particularly with his plays Let's Give them Curry (1981), and his Rasanayagam's Last Riot (1993) and 'He Still Comes from Jaffna' in which he explores the effects of the conflict between Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka. He has also taken works by Leonard Woolf, Nikolai Gogol and Anton Chekov and adapted them for the stage with a Sri Lankan flavour.
