playwrights
Gary Naylor
It took me a long time to "get" the English Middle Class, though I don’t think I completely understand them even now. Sure drowning in accents and assumed privilege in a Russell Group university Law faculty was a helluva’n education (some of it even on the curriculum). But it was only up close and personal, in their natural habitat, that allowed me to start on deciphering their arcane codes.Until then, as a kid does, I thought everybody just talked all the time, whether another person was speaking or not, said exactly what they thought and felt and that listening was optional (at best). If Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
After her lyrical tribute last year to a gone-too-soon young poet, Letters from Max, Sarah Ruhl returns to the Hampstead Theatre with the same director, Blanche McIntyre, though this time in the main house and with larger forces. It’s a big-hearted, funny production. Stage Kiss has a plot that’s almost Noel Coward-like in its ambitions: two actors who were once lovers are reunited in a 1930s melodrama, The Last Kiss, about a married woman, Ada, who is dying and wants to see her ex-lover one last time. The leads are required to kiss nine times per performance, 288 in the run in total Read more ...
Sarah Ruhl
Perhaps fate led me inevitably to the theatre as a great love because my first kiss was in a scene study class when I was 14 years old. My scene partner and I were working on a sweet little scene that ended in a kiss; at least, that’s what the stage directions told us.We were studying with the great Chicago acting teacher Joyce Piven. At the end of our performance for the class, the very sweet young man I was acting with planted one on me. I drew back in surprise, and Joyce said, in her unmistakable deep growl to the young actor, “Dear boy, you have to plan these things first!”I never became Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
David Pearson’s debut play, Firewing, part of Hampstead Theatre’s INSPIRE project for emerging writers, is a heartfelt two-hander about the importance of passing stuff on.“Stuff” is a key word in the dialogue, the portmanteau word with which a young man called Marcus (Charlie Beck, pictured below right) pads out his sentences, a sign of his unfinished education. He has now found a mentor, Tim (Gerard Horan, pictured below left), an older man who is steadily filling in some of the gaps. Marcus, we learn, is a son devoted to a mother who loves to paint but seems to have been felled by Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The indomitable Nicolas Kent has devised a new theatre piece to prick our consciences and refocus our minds, after his sterling work on the ugly underbelly of the Afghan wars and the Grenfell inquiry, inter alia. This one is less polished though not lacking in grit.Originally a project much like Kent’s The Great Game, a loose assemblage of full-length plays from leading writers about invasions of Afghanistan over the centuries, this has emerged as five much shorter plays about different aspects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The series has a chronological sweep, starting with Jonathan Read more ...