The following content may contain strong language. Click here to return to the main podcast page. To subscribe via iTunes click here. Full introduction by Simon Stephens: I sometimes think that our theatrical landscapes are defined as much by the shows we missed and deeply regret missing as they are by the shows that we’ve seen. Having not borne actual witness to the things they grow and develop in our imagination to become unthinkably brilliant. Certainly, this is the case in my mind...

The following content may contain strong language. Click here to return to the main podcast page. To subscribe via iTunes click here. Full introduction by Simon Stephens: I first came across the writing of Christopher Hampton by accident. In the early 90s I was flicking though the television. This was in the five-channel days when television was something that was possible to feasibly flick through. I stumbled upon the beautiful English actor Jeremy Irons talking directly to the camera...

The following content may contain strong language. Click here to return to the main podcast page. To subscribe via iTunes click here. Full introduction by Simon Stephens: The protest and controversy that surrounded the 2004 production of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Bezhiti (Dishnour) at the Birmingham Rep Theatre had several wounding consequences. It kindled an anger and confusion around, towards and from the significant Sikh Community in that city; it left that theatre looking...

The following content may contain strong language. Click here to return to the main podcast page. To subscribe via iTunes click here. Full introduction by Simon Stephens: “The first time I saw Zinnie Harris’s Royal Court debut play Nightingale and Chase I was in prison.  Specifically I was in Wandsworth prison in South London where I was representing the Royal Court as the theatre staged a production of her study of the injustices that underpin domestic violence to a hushed and clearly...

The following content may contain strong language. Click here to return to the main podcast page. To subscribe via iTunes click here. Full introduction by Simon Stephens: “One of the pleasures of making these podcasts is exploring the work of those writers I am talking to. It is an embarrassing confession that until this month I was entirely ignorant of the plays of Winsome Pinnock. I understood her to be a figure of real significance in British playwriting over the last three decades but...

The following content may contain strong language. Click here to return to the main podcast page. To subscribe via iTunes click here. Full introduction by Simon Stephens: “There are a handful of figures in the history of the Royal Court Theatre that define the place. They carved the path that, whether they are aware of it or not every artist that has worked here after them is attempting to travel down. One of that handful is the Welsh actor, director and playwright Peter Gill. Born in...

The following content may contain strong language. Click here to return to the main podcast page. To subscribe via iTunes click here. Full introduction by Simon Stephens: “There is a clarity and unity of vision to the dramatic world of David Eldridge that seems to land him in a particular tradition of British playwriting that I cherish. Born and raised in Romford, Essex the dramatis personae of many of his plays seem to be born out of the same place and, on a deep level, informed by that...

The following content may contain strong language. Click here to return to the main podcast page. To subscribe via iTunes click here. Full introduction by Simon Stephens: “There is something of a gesture of disguise to the plays of Laura Wade that I find to be as powerful as it is playful. Her 2005 play Colder Than Here might, for example, have looked like a familiar family drama but was in fact a play scorched in raw grief. Grief disguised as politeness. Her celebrated 2010 smash hit...

The following content may contain strong language. Click here to return to the main podcast page. To subscribe via iTunes click here. Full introduction by Simon Stephens: “One of the most important figures in the recent history of the Royal Court is the playwright Steven Jeffreys who for fifteen years worked as the Literary Associate here throughout the nineties and the start of this century. He was the mentor to a generation of playwrights including myself and the champion and agitator...

I first met Simon Stephens in 2011. I was an intern here at the Court and was tanning in the garden in my lunchbreak. Simon was here with his play Wastwater and was taking a moment’s break from rehearsals. I had watched a preview the night before. So I asked him about the ending which left me needing to know for sure whether the character of Jonathan was up to no good or not. I didn’t want to decide, I wanted the facts, and here was the writer himself. Simon graciously told me what I needed...

The plays of Timberlake Wertenbaker have been a presence in British theatre since the turn of the 1980s. Since that time she has produced work that is as defined by its sense of poetry and linguistic precision as it is by her characters’ yearning for justice or a sense of a home. Born in New York she was raised in the Basque fishing village of Cibure. She arrived in the fringes of London theatre when her first play, the brilliantly titled This Is No Place for Tallulah Bankhead, was produced...

There are very few writers I have interviewed or will interview in these podcasts whose curriculum vitae is longer than mine. And certainly none of those are some years younger than me. In this sense, in both his remarkable youth and strikingly prolific output Chris Thorpe has, over the past seventeen years, proven himself quite spectacular. The founding member of Unlimited Theatre and Artistic Associate of Third Angel, he established himself when there seemed to be a clear, sometimes...

Few playwrights can claim to have defined a theatrical form or process with quite the same conviction as Alecky Blythe. While she has never claimed to have invented the synthesis of verbatim theatre and the recorded delivery of text, in which actors receive lines through an earpiece and perform immediately in reception of the line, a synthesis that has been present throughout her work, she certainly established its definition. She started her theatrical career as an aspiring actor. She...

I was the Writers Tutor here at the Royal Court Theatre in 2001 when Leo Butler, fresh from a beautiful elegiac theatre debut in the 2000 Young Writers Festival with his play Made of Stone, was given a three month residency and shared his office with me. We drank a lot of tea together and ate a fair few biscuits and talked at length about the plays we had read and hoped to write. And one Friday he told me he was going to spend the weekend in the office. He was going to stay there from Friday...

The experience of watching a play that seems in some way to speak directly or resonate in a way that feels disarmingly personal has lead many playwrights to write for the first time. So it was with Penelope Skinner whom, in 2004, was so startled and moved by Jack Thorne’s When You Cure Me at the Bush theatre that, having spent years writing, as she puts it “the first chapters of novels and bad poems and a diary” she started writing her first play. The play she wrote F****d was a striking...

When Roy Williams’ first play No Boys Cricket Club launched him into the London theatre world in 1996 it was celebrated for the audacity and range of its theatrical imagination. At a time when new playwrights were often being encouraged to write simple plays for studio theatres, Roy Williams wrote a play that travelled across oceans, across continents and back in time charting the life of a woman inspired by his own mother. He was part of a generation of playwrights, many of whom wrote with...

There is a steel and intelligence at the heart of the plays of EV Crowe that has defined her as one of the most arresting of the exciting group of writers to have emerged out of the Young Writers Programme at the Royal Court in the past decade. She studied a masters course in playwriting at the University of East Anglia, one of the most renowned creative writing masters course in the UK. I first worked with her towards the end of my tenure as Writers Tutor here at the Young Writers...

In some ways Nathaniel Martello-White is, of all the writers I’ve spoken to on these podcasts, the least experienced. He has only had two plays produced professionally. Both of them to massive critical acclaim. But in other ways he is far more experienced than all of us. Martello-White has made his name over the past decade as one of the most compelling and young stage actors in Britain. Nuanced, poised performances in August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and Terel McRany’s The...

Anupama Chadrasekhar was born and raised in Chennai in India’s East Coat, in the heart of the Bay of Bengal. She started writing for theatre in the second half of the last decade when her early plays Closer Apart was produced in her hometown and her next, the self-directed Acid, was produced in Mumbai. She first came to British attention through her debut play Free Outgoing. Directed in 2007 upstairs at the Royal Court by Indhu Rubasingham it charted the psychological and emotional fallout...

I’m not sure I remember the very first time I met Mike Bartlett. I know he was a participant in one of the Young Writers Groups that I ran at the Royal Court in the early years of the last decade. After a few weeks I became quietly aware of his wry humour and quiet but forensic and determined intelligence. I do remember one early encounter with his work very clearly. I was sitting outside The Site in the back garden having a cigarette and reading students plays. By this stage Mike was in what...

Abi Morgan is one of the most prolific and celebrated dramatists of her generation. While she has reached international acclaim for her startling television and film work she began her trade in the theatre and has, over the course of the past two decades, made plays of formal confidence, emotional incision and darting theatricality. There are few screenwriters of such importance to have emerged in the UK this century. Bafta and Emmy winning work includes the television drama Sex Trafficked,...

The playwright Nick Payne started his professional career in London theatre in one of the most vital and fertile hotbeds of theatrical creativity in the city. Working at the National Theatre bookshop. He started writing at York University but it was after moving to the city and working at the bookshop that he wrote his first plays. Flourless and Lay Down Your Cross enjoyed readings at Soho theatre and the Royal Court respectively and SWITZERLAND was produced at the 2008 Hightide Festival. It...

The career of Bola Agbaje launched with one of the most confident and exciting debut swaggers in playwriting this century. Another of the graduates of Leo Butler’s energetic Young Writers programme here at the Court in 2007,  Agbaje’s Gone Too Far followed two young brothers raised in two different continents – one, Yemi, in London and his elder brother, Ikudayis, raised a Yoruba speaker Nigeria. The play charts the tension of the cultural clash when Ikudayisi moves to live with Yemi in...

The following content may contain strong language. Click here to return to the main podcast page. To subscribe via iTunes click here. Full introduction by Simon Stephens: I first encountered the plays of Howard Brenton right at the beginning of my life as a playwright. Before I’d properly written anything of my own I saw a student production of his 1984 play Bloody Poetry. A dramatic and haunting consideration of the relationship between Percy and Mary Shelley and Lord Byron and Claire...

The following content may contain strong language. Click here to return to the main podcast page. To subscribe via iTunes click here. Full introduction by Simon Stephens: “The play that lives with me most this year, as I talk in August 2017,  is Alice Birch’s remarkable Anatomy of a Suicide. Produced in the late spring here at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs and directed with exquisite detail and elegance by Katie Mitchell, in its humane and fearless study of despair and love it feels...