Our five new plays are written by some of the world’s most celebrated and controversial playwrights. The season begins with a play by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, the first woman to have a play performed on the main stage at the National Theatre, and also features works by: Frank McGuiness, considered by many to be Ireland’s greatest living playwright; Mark Ravenhill, who penned the satirical shock-fest, Shopping and F**king; Alia Bano, the Evening Standard’s Most Promising Playwright of 2009; and Eve Ensler, author of the global phenomenon, The Vagina Monologues.

Play 1 - The Typist
by Rebecca Lenkiewicz

Mary Parks, 70, is an artist and photographer who has lost her sight in the past two years. She employs a young boy, Fit, 20, to type up her notes for her. An odd relationship emerges. Fit is passionate about astronomy and Parks about colour. Parks asks Fit to help her to die. Fit refuses. He and Parks try to persuade each other to their way of thinking. Is life sacred in itself or is it only to be revered when one's existence is a full one?

Actors: Gemma Jones and Tobi Bakare
Director: Bijan Sheibani
Designer: Naomi Dawson
Lighting: Martin Kempton

by Mark Ravenhill

Lisa has breast cancer. Looking for help, she comes to Meryl a healer who believes in the power of positive thought. As time folds back on itself, Lisa and Meryl cross the line between the healer and the healed and discover that the world is full of ghosts.

'Ghost Story' is both a satire of the positive thinking movement and a moving story of a woman's battle with illness, set in a world where time is fluid and we can talk to the dead.

Actors: Lesley Manville, Lyndsey Marshal and Juliet Stevenson
Writer/Director: Mark Ravenhill
Designer: Chloe Lamford
Lighting: Will Charles

 

 

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Play 3 - Hens
by Alia Bano

Hens explores the relationship between four friends in their twenties on holiday together for a hen night. It looks at the joy, compromises one has to make, the intensity of spending so much time in each other’s company.

During a torrential downpour the four girls are forced to stay in each other’s company in a three star hotel in the centre of Paris, where secrets and antagonisms begin to unravel.  Friendships are threatened and new alliances are formed.  

Actors: Chetna Pandya, Georgia Moffett, Shereen Martineau and Stephanie Street
Director: Peter Gill
Assitant Director: Jamie Rocha
Designer: Tom Rogers
Lighting: Martin Kempton

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Play 4 - Crocodile
by Frank McGuinness

In a small room away from prying eyes and ears a young girl meets a woman. The woman has studied law in England. The girl has committed a horrific crime. “I could help you,” says the woman. As the girl begins to speak, in stories, in riddles, the woman pieces together the truth about the crime. As she tells her stories, the young girl begins to sense the secrets the lawyer herself is desperate to hide.

Frank McGuinness’ new play delves into the darkest aspects of charity and aid, of guilt and penitence and of our need to find expression for our secrets and our crimes. Poetic, lyrical, haunting.

Actors: Corrina Silvester, Pippa Bennett-Warner and Sinead Cusack
Director: Toby Frow
Designer: Ben Stones
Lighting: Will Charles

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Play 5 - Here
by Eve Ensler

At the beginning of the new play, HERE, a middle-aged man and woman are sitting on a couch in their living room eating a sandwich when another very similar looking middle-aged couple arrives thinking they have finally come home.

As the first couple struggles to deal with what the husband calls their “invaders” their different perspectives on the situation begins the disassembling of their marriage. The play is a bizarre tragicomedy that asks, Who owns what and whom? It is an investigation of the various forms of occupation, the impossibility of trust and the underlying and mysterious dynamics of relationships.

Actors: Fiona Glascott, Francesca Annis, Matthew Marsh and Tom Brooke
Director: Josie Rourke
Designer: Lucy Osborne
Lighting: Martin Kempton

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