Inspired by Intimate Death by Marie de Hennezel.Can the dying teach us how to live? Inspired by the experiences of psychologist and palliative careworker Marie de Hennezel, we are asked to accompany people towards death. Characters explain to the audience the nature and progress of their disease and share final thoughts and deeds. A beautifully simple piece. On Death is part of a groundbreaking series of 'theatre essays', which use drama as a way of exploring the fundamental preoccupations of modern life. Other works include On Love and On Ego.
Chekhov’s great play, written in 1896, bursts into the 21st century with the burdens of the past bearing witness to the freedoms of the future.
"Without crime I became a criminal. Without payment I became a whore" Munich, 1906. Klara lives with her singing teacher and his wife. But when a backstreet abortionist is arrested, a secret emerges which theatens to destroy the household's respectability. Frank Wedekind was the great rebel of European theatre, best known for Spring Awakening and the Lulu Plays. In Musik he delivers a blistering attack on middle-class hyprocrisy and double-standards.This exhiliarating adaptation by Neil Fleming opened The Last Waltz Season at the Arcola Theatre, London in March 2005.
Someone in a white coat said I was one of those who are addicted to the total all-embracing experience.' Leigh meets Angel and her life is turned upside town. Sex, race, drugs and verbals collide in this terrifyingly beautiful roller-coaster drama. The world premiere of Adrenalin Heart opened Naked Talent at The Bush Theatre in 2002, a season of three first full-length plays by some of the sharpest new voices in today's theatre.
You’re an agoraphobic drug dealer who suffers panic attacks. Not good for business. Enter a teenage boy with a dangerous ambition, a lapdancer who’ll do anything for a hit and a hard man on a mission. Could the day get any darker on Sunbeam Terrace? Mark Catley was born in Leeds and grew up within sight of Beeston's Sunbeam Terrace. He was the first writer commissioned by the Playhouse as part of the BBC's New Writing scheme, Northern Exposure. Sunbeam Terrace was performed at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, in Spring 2003
Fifteen-year-old Charlie has serious ambitions – to mess with teachers' heads, to front a gang, to ride the motorbike that blows all competition out of the water. But when the new music teacher, Miss Fry, arrives, things start to change.
Two daughters, two mothers, one father, a cardboard cut-out and a foul-mouthed granny – a household at war with itself, and a family which will do anything to protect its’ secrets. Behsharam (Shameless) follows second generation sisters, Jaspal and Sati, through the fantasies, dysfunctions and obsessions of their extraordinary extended family.Set in Birmingham, this is a bold, disturbing and at times hilarious exploration of the British Asian experience.
A new play by Simon Bent. Inspired by John Lahr's biography and the diaries of Joe Orton. 1962. Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton – RADA graduates, aspiring playwrights, and sometime lovers – plot their rightful place at the centre of London’s literary scene. But after a short interlude at Her Majesty’s pleasure, Joe is about to become the greatest, and most notorious comic playwright since Oscar Wilde, whilst Ken stays indoors re-decorating, reduced to sharing Joe’s success with their neighbour, Mrs Corden, over tea and a slice of battenburg.Prick Up Your Ears – a darkly funny and moving play imagines what really happened when, after years of creative collaboration, the door slammed shut and Kenneth was home alone. It tells the sensational story behind the domestic life of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, holed up in a tiny flat in Islington, trading well-trodden insults and hilarious put-downs like any old married couple.Prick Up Your Ears opened at the Comedy Theatre, London in September 2009, with a cast including Little Britain’s Matt Lucas and Chris New.
Winner of Best Playwright and Best Director at the 2003 New York Fringe FestivalLogan Brown and Matthew Benjamin's hilarious take on casual carnage is a laugh-a-minute, fast-paced classic cop-caper, with drugs, guns and bodies in car trunks. But it combines this tale of sexy young things behaving badly with a twister of a morality tale, begging the question what would you do if you could get away with it? How to Act Around Cops is a timely and illuminating insight into the corrupting effect of power in the world's richest nations, and asks the question: if you're untouchable surely you can do anything and get away with it?Production at the Pleasance Courtyard at the Edinburgh Fringe 2004 followed by a transfer to the Soho Theatre, London.
A new adaptation of Oscar Wilde's murderously funny comedy.Young Lord Arthur is deliriously happy: a pillar of society on the verge of marriage, until a brief departure from Victorian convention leads him to the abode of a chilling clairvoyant who gravely pronounces that before he can marry he must commit murder.Lord Arthur Savile's Crime was a 2006 touring production by Bill Kenwright Ltd starring Russ Abbot.