Royal Court Playwright's Podcast

Joel Tan has been described as one of the most exciting Singaporean playwrights of his generation. In Singapore his plays have been produced by leading theatre companies including Checkpoint Theatre and Wild Rice. Recently, his work in the UK includes the Living Newspaper at the Royal Court, as well as Love in the Time of the Ancients, and No Particular Order. Joel's play Scenes from a Repatriation runs at the Royal Court Theatre this April.

Khawla Ibraheem is a playwright, actor and director based in the Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights. She is a regular at many theatres in Palestine and outside of Palestine she has collaborated with many theatres and institutions, including as a fellow at the McDowell, and as an artist in residence at the Sundance Theatre Lab. Khawla's one-woman play, A Knock on the Roof, opens at the Royal Court later this month.

Lauren Mooney and James Yeatman make up the award winning theatre company Kandinsky, who make collaborative new work. Their latest project, More Life, has been developed at the New Diorama, National Theatre Studios and the Royal Court, and will debut at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in February 2025.

Amy Jephta is a South African playwright, screenwriter and actor based in Cape Town. She was named one of the Mail and Guardian's 200 Top Young South Africans in 2013 and is the recipient of South Africa's highest art accolade - The Standard Bank Young Artist Award. Amy's play, A Good House, runs at the Royal Court in January 2025.

Sutara Gayle is a writer and performer, also known as the award-winning, South London reggae artist Lorna Gee. Last year, her one woman play The Legends of Them, played a highly acclaimed run at Brixton House, produced by the Hackney Showroom. This Christmas it will run in the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs.

Emteaz Hussain is a playwright and performance poet. As a performance poet she has toured both nationally and internationally. As a writer, her plays include Social Distancing, Etching and writing as part of the Royal Court's Living Newspaper. Her latest play Expendable, will play in the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs later this year.

Oli Forsyth is a TV and theatre writer, as well as having his own theatre company Smoke and Oakum. His plays have been performed at the New Diorama, Hampstead, Vault Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe. This year, his play BRACE BRACE will play in the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs.

Mark Rosenblatt is a writer and director for stage and screen. He's worked as a theatre director since 1998 and in that time has worked as the Associate Director at Leeds Playhouse, and Studio Associate at the National Theatre. This year, his debut play Giant will play in the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Downstairs.

Tife Kusoro is a writer and performer whose work has previously been shortlisted for the Alfred Fagon award, Verity Bargate award and the Women's Prize for Playwriting. Tife's play G was developed whilst on attachment with the Royal Court, it will debut in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs later this year.

Nassim Soleimanpour is a playwright, theatre maker and the Artistic Director of the Berlin Based Theatre company Nassim Soleimanpour Productions. This year, his latest piece Echo debuts in the Royal Court Theatre's Jerwood Theatre Downstairs in collaboration with LIFT.

Stewart Pringle is a playwright and dramaturg. He currently works as Senior Dramaturg at the National Theatre. His latest play The Bounds will play in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs later this year.

Ciara Elizabeth Smyth is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter. Her latest play Lie Low was presented in the Traverse Theatre as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2023. Lie Low makes it London debut this year in the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs. 

Margaret Perry is an award-winning playwright. Her stage work includes Porcelain, Collapsible and Paradise Now! which was nominated for a 2023 Olivier Award (Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre). This year, she collaborates with Katie Mitchell on an adaptation of Maggie Nelson's ‘Bluets', which will play in the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs later this year.

Sabrina Ali is a British Somali writer and actor, who is driven by a passion for sharing authentic and representative stories. Sabrina's most recent play, Dugsi Dayz, played at Edinburgh Fringe 2023, returned to the New Diorama last year and will play in the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs this Spring.

Dirty Hare are an award-winning theatre company, made up of director and facilitator Rachel Lemon, historian, musician and writer Lydia Higman and actor and writer Julia Grogan. Dirty Hare's award-winning production of Gunter transfers to the Royal Court theatre upstairs following its sold-out premiere at Summerhall at the Edinburgh Fringe last year.

Caro is a Bachelor of Psychology with experience in social research in public policies. As a playwright, their plays include "Asfixia" and "Tomás". They have been a resident at the Royal Court's International Playwrights' Programme and have taken part in their Long-Form Writing Group.

Nazareth Hassan is an interdisciplinary artist working in writing, performance, music, sound, video & photography based in Brooklyn, New York.

Pablo Manzi has developed most of his work as a playwright with the Chile-based collective BONOBO. His texts have been presented in festivals in Japan, Italy, The Netherlands, Peru, Germany, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Belgium, the USA, Sweden and Chile. He was invited by the Royal Court theatre and the British Council to do a residency in London where he wrote ‘A Fight Against…'/‘Una Lucha Contra…'

Amir Gudarzi is a writer born in Tehran, Iran, in 1986. Due to censorship his plays were only shown in private circles. And since 2009, Amir has lived in involuntary exile in Vienna, Austria.

For twenty years Wende has been one of the most celebrated singers and performers in the whole of Europe. She released her first album in 2004 as a graduate from the Amsterdam Theatre School. The following seventeen years have seen her release nine more albums and tour the continent to sell out audiences. At the Royal Court in 2019 she debuted a remarkable exploration of the form of songwriting with The Song Project. It returns to the Royal Court this Summer 2021.

The theatre making duo made up of director Talia Paulette Oliveras and writer Nia Farrell, collectively known as TaNia, met while studying experimental and collaborative theatre making at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. The power of their theoretical rigour and the incision of their thought as a means of critiquing power was maybe developed at NYU, but there is no arid or academic crust to the work that TaNia first developed there: the visceral, playful, humane, angry, Afrofuturist theatre event Dreams in Blk Major.

Sam Max is in the early years of their working life but judging from the level of interest their work has provoked and from the depth and clarity of imagination that defines COOP, they are one of those writers whose work over the coming decade has the potential to allow us to reimagine ourselves as we come out of the pandemic.

Eve Leigh is a writer of range and conviction. Her theatre is built on an understanding of the importance of the presence of the audience in her work. She invents games for them to play. She imagines magic tricks for them to take part in. She makes music for them to listen to. In recent years her commitment to the investigation of issues of ability and access in the theatre have been integrated into her work in a way that is as theatrical and playful as it is serious and nuanced.

Quebecoise musician, artist, director, actor and writer Laurence Dauphinais has a body of work that is defined by its diversity. Her beautiful piece of documentary drama Aalaapi, which has been chosen for the 2020/21 Stückemarkt, was her debut as solo director. It premiered at the Centre du Théâtre d'Aujourd'hui (CTDA) in Montréal where it won the 2020 Playwright's Prize.

Over the course of the last decade Jude Christian has established herself as one of the most exciting directors, dramaturgs, and theatre makers in British theatre. She has written, developed and performed a quite shattering and unique piece of theatre. Nanjing dramatizes her own exploration of her own history.

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Playwright, poet, performer, presenter, screenwriter, anthologist and librettist Sabrina Mahfouz has written and produced up to twenty plays in the last ten years. She is a compelling performer, passionate and witty and savage and self-deprecating by turn, and her energy has driven one of the most dizzyingly prolific and formally surprising careers in contemporary British Theatre.

Jack Thorne has written the most popular play of the century, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. He has written for television, most recently with His Dark Materials, and won five Bafta Awards including for his series Shades and his remarkable collaboration with Shane Meadows that led to the This is England series 86, 88 and 90.

David Ireland is a man whose family names makes writing short essays about his paradoxical national identity, biography and work tremendously complicated. His 2016 play Cyprus Avenue directed by Royal Court Artistic Director Vicky Featherstone in a co-production between the Court and Dublin’s Abbey Theatre propelled Ireland to international attention.

Over the last decade, Stef Smith has become one of the UK’s most urgent theatre makers. She is restless, not just in the face of her world’s deep grained political and economic injustices of the highest order but also in the capacity for conventional theatre forms to properly explore those injustices. It is this restlessness that has driven and defined one of the most compelling theatrical biographies of the decade.

Oscar winner Christopher Hampton is a name that has appeared in many, many, many places. In 1966, England won the world cup and Hampton became the youngest playwright to have a play produced in the commercial theatre in the modern age. Between 1968 and 1970 he was the resident dramatist and Literary Manager at the Royal Court.

Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's 2004 production of Bezhiti (Dishnour) led to threats of violence against her and her family. It also has distracted many people from the fierce energy, honesty and clarity of her plays. Kaur Bhatti made her Royal Court debut in 2014 with the beautiful Khandan (Family).

Zinnie Harris has been a presence in the new writing scenes of her home country of Scotland and in London alike. In that time, no writer has drawn so fully and with such imagination from the classical cannon of dramatic literature. Harris's plays are creatures steeped in their dramatic past. Classical heritage sits in her own original work as freshly as in those adaptations.

The debt that recent years of black British playwrights owes to Winsome Pinnock has been celebrated and is unarguable. While upholding and championing her cultural presence as a figure of enormous importance in the recent dramatising of Black experience in the country, she has dramatised the existential catastrophes brought about by capital and gender inequality as much as by the innate racism of the legacy of British colonialism.

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.

A prolific and successful television and radio writer, David Eldridge has defined himself as a dramatist with force and clarity, humanity and capacity for contradiction with which he has built a dramatic version of London’s East End.

Laura Wade's plays return to formal inventiveness with wit and imagination. This inventiveness is counterpointed by an insistent fascination with England as it struggles to define itself in the face of accelerating redundancy. This counterpoint has led to be one of the most exciting bodies of work in contemporary playwriting.

Jez Butterworth hasn’t written prolifically for theatre. In fact he has written seven stage plays in nearly twenty five years but three of them have been, arguably, the defining plays of their decade.

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.

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.

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.

Few playwrights can claim to have defined a theatrical form or process with quite the same conviction as Alecky Blythe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.