Don Taylor was a playwright and poet, and a director of theatre, television and radio plays.

After leaving Oxford, he worked as drama director at the BBC, and between 1960 and 1990, he directed nearly a 100 television plays, the first works by David Mercer and Hugh Whitemore, as well as 17 of his own original TV plays, and a number of large-scale classical productions of Shakespeare, Granville Barker, Arthur Miller, Sheridan, Bulgakov and Edward Bond.

He translated and directed for BBC Television and Theban plays of Sophocles - Oedipus the King, Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus. He followed this with translations of three Euripides war plays –⁠ Iphigenia at Aulis (directed by Katie Mitchell, initially at the Abbey Theatre in 2001 and at the National Theatre in 2004), The Women of Troy and Helen.

He continued working in the theatre, directing Sir Anthony Quayle in his last King Lear and also in Gogol's The Government Inspector for Compass Theatre, of which he was co-director at the time.

In 1996 he and Ellen Dryden set up First Writes Radio, an independent drama company. Don Taylor's many stage plays include The Roses of Eyam, The Exorcism, Daughters of Venice, Brotherhood, When the Actors Come, Retreat from Moscow, When the Barbarians Came and The Road to the Sea.

He died in 2003. 

Euripides was born near Athens between 485 and 480 BCE and grew up during the years of Athenian recovery after the Persian Wars.

His first play was presented in 455 BCE and he wrote some hundred altogether. Nineteen survive –⁠ a greater number than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles combined –⁠ including Alkestis, Medea, Bacchae, Hippolytos, Ion and Iphigenia at Aulis.

His later plays are marked by a sense of disillusion at the futility of human aspiration which amounts on occasion to a philosophy of absurdism.

A year or two before his death he left Athens to live at the court of the king of Macedon, dying there in 406 BCE.