playwrights
aleks.sierz
Caryl Churchill, Britain's best living playwright, is enjoying a spate of high-profile revivals of her classic work. Last year, the National Theatre staged her Top Girls, and an upcoming production of A Number is coming soon to the Bridge Theatre. In the meantime, Far Away, her visionary 2000 play about genocide and the war on terror, arrives at the Donmar Warehouse. Twenty years after its first outing at the Royal Court, when it was staged by Stephen Daldry (didn't he do well?), it is now directed by Lyndsey Turner, who in 2019 reinterpreted Top Girls as a big state-of-the-nation drama in a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This morning the largest annual, curated multi-arts festival in England launched and announced its programme of events. With Guest Director, British and Ethiopian poet-playwright-broadcaster Lemn Sissay, MBE, at the helm, Brighton Festival 2020 is themed as Imagine Nation and runs May 2-24. For the seventh year running, theartsdesk will be a major media partner, showcasing preview interviews and reviewing the best of the festival.No longer restricted solely to the city of Brighton & Hove itself, the Festival now takes place across the region with over 120 events, including 17 premieres, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Your sweet tooth can get you into trouble. Lots of trouble. In this revival of Lucy Prebble's provocative debut, first staged at the Royal Court in 2003, the metaphor of sugar, and of the powerful attractions of this drug-like substance – bad for you, but providing an instant hit – is explored through a disturbing story about paedophilia and the internet. Since writing this play, Prebble has gone on to create large-scale contemporary classics such as Enron and A Very Expensive Poison, but, with the exception of The Effect, none of her later plays match her first one for sheer emotional Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Last night, I discovered the gasp index. Or maybe just re-discovered. The what? The gasp index. It's when you see a show that keeps making you exhale, sometimes audibly, sometimes quietly. Tonight I gasped about five times, then I stopped counting – I was hooked. I was obviously in the right place: the Royal Court has the reputation of being a powerhouse (to use a marketing term) of new writing. Yet, often my experience here has been of seeing old writing in a youthful guise; but this time was differenet – it feels like the real thing. From the start, Mancunian playwright Miriam Battye's Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The prolific Mike Bartlett – from whose pen have leapt television series such as Doctor Foster and Press, as well as stage hits such as King Charles III – has two things to celebrate tonight. On ITV his new three-part psychological drama, Sticks and Stones, begins, and this is also the opening night of his new play at the Kiln. Originally staged in Oxford a year ago, its title, Snowflake, alludes both to the old idea of a white Christmas and to the current derogatory sneer about young people being too fragile to cope with the heat of life.Set on Christmas Eve, in what looks like a draughty Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The trouble with prejudice is that you can't control how other people see you. At the start of her career, playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's work was set in her own Sikh community. But, like other playwrights from similar backgrounds, she has tended to be pigeonholed in the category of "Asian playwright", and expected to write about clichéd subjects such as arranged marriage or religion. Now, however, she vigorously breaks free with this new play at the Royal Court, a story about life in contemporary Britain. This time she has expanded her cast of characters by creating a wonderfully Read more ...
Heather Neill
This is the third Emlyn Williams piece to be presented here in a decade: The Druid's Rest in 2009 was followed by the enormous success of Accolade, directed by Blanche McIntyre, two years later.If it's a truism that neglected plays may well have been neglected for good reason, it is also true that forgotten work can chime unexpectedly with current taste or reveal new elements in the output of a writer previously dismissed as out-of-date. Terence Rattigan's reinstatement in the canon is the most obvious example, but the Finborough has made a reputation for rediscovering the work of writers no Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Family dramas are a staple of British new writing, but as well as talking about our nearest and dearest, can they also say something about the wider society? The Arrival, by director turned playwright Bijan Sheibani, who won an Olivier award for Bola Agbaje's Gone Too Far! in 2008, has ambitions to be a study of masculinity in crisis. After all, Agbaje's play was about brothers, and both of his recent directing hits – The Brothers Size and Barber Shop Chronicles – were pungent with testosterone. His new one opens at the Bush Theatre, which is enjoying a great run of plays in new artistic Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Actor Miriam Margolyes is a phenomenon. Not only has this Dickensian starred in high-profile shows both here and in Australia, a country whose citizenship she took up in 2013, but she is also Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter films. And a familiar face from television. And a voice on radio. The programme lists her 12 major awards. Now she returns to the Park Theatre, having starred in its sellout show Madame Rubinstein a couple of years ago, in a family drama by another Park returnee, actor turned playwright Eugene O'Hare, whose bleak debut, The Weatherman, provoked controversy in its Read more ...
Simon Stephens
Light Falls is the sixth play that I have written for the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester and the fourth that its outgoing Artistic Director, Sarah Frankcom, will direct.She directed On the Shore of the Wide World, Punk Rock and Blindsided. In many ways Light Falls marks a culmination of a collaboration that has informed my working life and a return to ideas I have been interrogating in that collaboration.I was born in Stockport and lived there until I went to university when I was 18. I live in London now and have done for 25 years. The relationship between the two places continues to Read more ...
Hannah Khalil
It all started in 2009 in the National Portrait Gallery. I’d had a meeting nearby so popped in to get a cuppa and stare at the beautiful rooftop view of London from their top-floor café, but a picture caught my eye. It was part of an exhibition of Victorian Women Explorers, a photograph of a woman with a rather severe face. The label said something like: "Gertrude Bell – Mountaineer, Explorer, Diplomat and Spy. Travelled widely through the Middle East, spoke every dialect of Arabic and Persian and was responsible for drawing the lines of what became modern Iraq. Founder of the Museum of Iraq Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Clean Break, the theatre company that specialises in working with women in the criminal justice system, is doing a lot of celebrating. It's the 40th anniversary of this unique female organisation and already this year they have put on a variety of shows, from Chloe Moss's Sweatbox to the devised piece Inside Bitch. Now they are teaming up with Alice Birch, one of British theatre's most experimental writers, to produce [Blank] at the Donmar Warehouse, which likewise is reinventing itself as a cutting-edge venue. The theme, predictably enough, is the impact of criminal justice on women and Read more ...