Contemporary Dramatists
6 total works
This second collection of plays by Simon Stephens, winner of the 2005 Olivier Award for Best New Play for On the Shore of the Wide World, perfectly showcases the development of one of the most exciting and impressive theatre talents of recent years. The range of plays in this volume displays a tough sensibility and a courage to confront the more unsettling challenges of our times. One Minute, first produced in 2003 and revived in London in 2008, has an uncomfortable resonance as it follows five characters variously affected by the disappearance of Daisy, an 11-year-old girl, from Seven Dials, Covent Garden. Country Music spotlights four fateful moments in the life of Jamie Carris during and after the prison sentences he has served for glassing one man and for killing another. Motortown, written in response to the War on Terror, is a blistering account of a young soldier's return home from Basra to an England he no longer recognises or connects with. Pornography captures Britain as it crashes from the euphoria and promise of the 2012 Olympics announcement into the devastation of the London bombings of 7/7.
The final play, Sea Wall, is a one-act monologue about grief, following the drowning of a young child.
The final play, Sea Wall, is a one-act monologue about grief, following the drowning of a young child.
Harper Regan follows a woman's road trip through the heart of England in a violent and comic exploration of the moralities of sex and death. Quietly harrowing, this play is a barometer for our times exploring dark secrets and familial estrangement.
Marine Parade is a musical about sex, betrayal and hope, set in a run-down B&B on Brighton's waterfront. A moving and poignant play, it 'captures the peculiar aroma of Brighton, with its mix of the bracing and the melancholy' (Guardian).
Olivier award-winning play On the Shore of the Wide World is an epic piece about love, family, Roy Keane and the size of the galaxy.
Punk Rock is based on Simon Stephens's experience as a teacher and he describes this play as 'The History Boys on crack'. It explores the underlying tensions and potential violence in a group of affluent, articulate seventeen year old students.
Marine Parade is a musical about sex, betrayal and hope, set in a run-down B&B on Brighton's waterfront. A moving and poignant play, it 'captures the peculiar aroma of Brighton, with its mix of the bracing and the melancholy' (Guardian).
Olivier award-winning play On the Shore of the Wide World is an epic piece about love, family, Roy Keane and the size of the galaxy.
Punk Rock is based on Simon Stephens's experience as a teacher and he describes this play as 'The History Boys on crack'. It explores the underlying tensions and potential violence in a group of affluent, articulate seventeen year old students.
Four plays inspired by and originating on the European stage from one of Britain's most important playwrights.
Three Kingdoms was presented at Teater NO99 in Tallinn, Estonia on 17 September 2011, before opening at the Munich Kammerspiele, Germany, on 15 October 2011. 'An inconsolable mood of dread, abandon, violence and suspicion lurks beneath the show's skin of arty insouciance, and at times the script attains a lyrical pitch of accusation against the West that quite overrides the flippancy. There's something of value here.' Daily Telegraph;
The Trial of Ubu premiered at the Schauspielhaus Essen in a co-production with the Toneelgroep Amsterdam. 'The play certainly gets at the banality of evil, and evokes the slow, sometimes dull, often uncertain slog of justice.' Sunday Times.
Subtitled 'A Play For Young People', Morning was developed in partnership between the Lyric Hammersmith, London, and the Junges Theater, Goettingen. The Financial Times described it as 'theatrically daring and uncompromising';
Carmen Disruption, a reimagining of Bizet's opera, premiered at the Deutsche Spielhaus in spring, 2014, before its UK premiere at the Almeida, London, in April 2015. 'You can't help but be moved by the circumstances facing the five main characters. There's an understanding and a compassion amid the bleakness. And a fierce sense that something needs to change.' Guardian;
Three Kingdoms was presented at Teater NO99 in Tallinn, Estonia on 17 September 2011, before opening at the Munich Kammerspiele, Germany, on 15 October 2011. 'An inconsolable mood of dread, abandon, violence and suspicion lurks beneath the show's skin of arty insouciance, and at times the script attains a lyrical pitch of accusation against the West that quite overrides the flippancy. There's something of value here.' Daily Telegraph;
The Trial of Ubu premiered at the Schauspielhaus Essen in a co-production with the Toneelgroep Amsterdam. 'The play certainly gets at the banality of evil, and evokes the slow, sometimes dull, often uncertain slog of justice.' Sunday Times.
Subtitled 'A Play For Young People', Morning was developed in partnership between the Lyric Hammersmith, London, and the Junges Theater, Goettingen. The Financial Times described it as 'theatrically daring and uncompromising';
Carmen Disruption, a reimagining of Bizet's opera, premiered at the Deutsche Spielhaus in spring, 2014, before its UK premiere at the Almeida, London, in April 2015. 'You can't help but be moved by the circumstances facing the five main characters. There's an understanding and a compassion amid the bleakness. And a fierce sense that something needs to change.' Guardian;
First collection from the 2004 Pearson Award-winning playwright Simon Stephens Plays: 1 brings together four of the early plays from the winner of the 2002 Pearson Best New Play Award. Since Bluebird in 1998, Stephens has gained recognition for humane plays that display a sharp observation and compassionate response to the lives of ordinary people in urban locations. Bluebird: Cabbie Jimmy overhears the weird, wonderful and violent tales of his passengers he confronts his past and his estranged wife. 'A rough gem of a play' - The Times Christmas: One night in an East end pub, four men confront their past and brace themselves for an uncertain future. 'Beautifully crafted' - What's On Herons: The disturbing story of one teenager on a violent estate in London, which saw Stephens nominated for an Olivier Award for Most Promising Playwright in 2001. Port: One woman's struggle to cope with and finally escape her life in Stockport. (Winner of Pearson Award for Best New Play.) 'A brilliant writer of immense imagination with an acute observation of people's foibles' - Independent
"Stephens writes dramas set in uncaring, uncompromising worlds, whose characters speak in a language at once naturalistic and yet artificially pared-down and whose uncertain attempts to assert their own identities sometimes lead to gratuitous and brutal acts of violence." - Financial Times
A fifth collection of plays by one of Britain's most prolific contemporary playwrights, Simon Stephens, charting his work from 2011-2016, ranging from London's Royal Court Theatre, Manchester's Royal Exchange and Broadway.
Wastwater (2011) "Metaphoric, allusive, and thoroughly disturbing in its evocation of suspicion and uncertainty, Wastwater is a thought-provoking play whose quiet intensity stays with you for days — its effect is like that of a ugly stone dropped into a pool, which results in constant ripples of dirty water lapping at your subconscious" (Aleks Sierz)
Birdland (2014) "Mega-fame and limitless cash can turn a man into a monster, and Simon Stephens's new play excellently evokes its hero's spiritually shrunken world" (Michael Billington, Guardian)
Blindsided (2014) “the dialogue has a rare quality of moment-by-moment intensity" (Telegraph)
Song From Far Away (2015) "a meditative monologue – a searching study of impotently self-aware emotional insufficiency" (Independent)
Heisenberg (2016) "Mr. Stephens ... is an uncannily subtle dramatist who never wears his depths on the surface ... he probes clichés until they fall apart, before reassembling them into solid but transformed shapes, reminding us why such clichés have become enduring elements of our collective mythology." (Ben Brantley, New York Times)
A fifth collection of plays by one of Britain's most prolific contemporary playwrights, Simon Stephens, charting his work from 2011-2016, ranging from London's Royal Court Theatre, Manchester's Royal Exchange and Broadway.
Wastwater (2011) "Metaphoric, allusive, and thoroughly disturbing in its evocation of suspicion and uncertainty, Wastwater is a thought-provoking play whose quiet intensity stays with you for days — its effect is like that of a ugly stone dropped into a pool, which results in constant ripples of dirty water lapping at your subconscious" (Aleks Sierz)
Birdland (2014) "Mega-fame and limitless cash can turn a man into a monster, and Simon Stephens's new play excellently evokes its hero's spiritually shrunken world" (Michael Billington, Guardian)
Blindsided (2014) “the dialogue has a rare quality of moment-by-moment intensity" (Telegraph)
Song From Far Away (2015) "a meditative monologue – a searching study of impotently self-aware emotional insufficiency" (Independent)
Heisenberg (2016) "Mr. Stephens ... is an uncannily subtle dramatist who never wears his depths on the surface ... he probes clichés until they fall apart, before reassembling them into solid but transformed shapes, reminding us why such clichés have become enduring elements of our collective mythology." (Ben Brantley, New York Times)