Search results for ""author nicholas wright""

A comedy drama set in the seedily glamorous world of 17th-century London theatre. John Shank is an actor, talent-scout and trainer of boy players in the 1630s, when women's roles are still played by precocious boys. Up to his eyes in debt, Shank's only hope of escaping destitution is an unpromising 14-year-old would-be, Stephen Hammerton. Can he train up Stephen to be the new star of the London stage? Nicholas Wright's play Cressida was first performed at the Albery Theatre, London, in 2000, in a production by the Almeida Theatre.

Read more less

‘Iago only suspected it. I know.’ Celebrated actor, singer and political campaigner Paul Robeson is touring the United States of America as Othello. His Desdemona is the brilliant young actress Uta Hagen. Her husband, the Broadway star José Ferrer, plays Iago. The actors are all friends, but they are not all equals. As the tour progresses, onstage passions and offstage lives begin to blur. Revenge takes many forms and in post-war America it isn't always purely personal – it can be disturbingly political too. Based on true events, Nicholas Wright's play 8 Hotels was first staged at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester, in 2019, in a production directed by Richard Eyre.

Read more less

Nicholas Wright's play about the controversial psychoanalyst Melanie Klein is a haunting and poignant study of mother-daughter relationships. In 1934 the son of Melanie Klein, Britain's most admired psychoanalyst, was reported killed in a climbing accident. There were no witnesses. Nicholas Wright's play shows the effect of this shattering and unexpected death on Mrs Klein, on her daughter and on her new assistant Paula, a young refugee from Hitler's Berlin. Melanie Klein had herself come to Britain from Berlin with a controversial mission to extend psychoanalysis to infants. But her analysis of her own children has damaged her relationship with them almost beyond repair, and the news of her son's death provokes a bitter confrontation with her daughter. Nicholas Wright's Mrs Klein was first performed at the National Theatre, London, in 1988. This edition was published alongside the revival at the Almeida Theatre in 2009.

Read more less

An enthralling detective story based on the true life story of BBC reporter James Mossman. A brilliant man kills himself mid-career, leaving behind a cryptic suicide note. Based on the remarkable life of the star BBC correspondent James Mossman during his last years, 1963 to 1971, Nicholas Wright's play The Reporter searches for the truth behind his bewildering suicide. What lies beneath the surface? Or is the surface ultimately all there is? The Reporter was first staged at the National Theatre, London, in 2007.

Read more less

A moving portrait of the young Vincent van Gogh - a hit in the West End and on Broadway. Winner of the 2003 Olivier Award for Best New Play. Brixton, 1873. A brash young Dutchman rents a room in the house of an English widow. Three years later he returns to Europe on the first step of a journey which will end in breakdown, death and immortality. Nicholas Wright's play Vincent in Brixton was first performed at the National Theatre, London, in the Cottesloe auditorium, in April 2002, directed by Richard Eyre. The production transferred to Wyndhams Theatre in the West End in August 2002.

Read more less

Nicholas Wright's version of Wedekind's celebrated erotic masterpiece is the first to be based on the author's original text, restoring the clarity, the daring and the sexual explicitness of a modern masterpiece written a hundred years before its time. Lulu is the story of the decline and fall of a young woman possessed of a fatal combination of sexuality and innocence. She passes from German and Parisian high society to the streets of Jack the Ripper's London – destroying, and ultimately destroyed by, her lovers. Wedekind originally wrote his extraordinary 'monster tragedy' a full twenty years before the First World War. Finding no-one prepared to stage it on account of its sexual candour, he toned it down and rewrote it as two full-length dramas, which is how The Lulu Plays were published and produced throughout most of the twentieth century. Nicholas Wright's version, based on Wedekind's original text, reveals the author's original conception for the play. It was premiered at the Almeida Theatre, London, in 2001.

Read more less

An earthy, cruel, and hilarious family drama of profound and reckless love Set in a bar in the Florida Everglades, this biting, brutally funny multigenerational family drama concerns a Gulf Coast couple, their disabled young ward, two lesbian tenants, and the bonds that bind them all together. The eleventh winner of the Yale Drama Series playwriting competition, it is a powerful story born out of the playwright’s own experiences with the rapidly changing social environment of rural Florida, where long-standing traditions and beliefs can collide, sometimes dangerously, with new ideas of personhood, identity, and self-realization. A rich and colorful mélange of American classes and cultures, Bottle Fly recounts a profoundly human struggle to reconcile the masks worn at home with the ones donned to go out into the world.

Read more less

A gripping psychological thriller adapted for the stage by Émile Zola himself from his own notorious novel, in a version by Nicholas Wright. Stifled by an oppressive mother-in-law and a sickly husband, Thérèse Raquin falls passionately for another man. Their feverish affair drives the lovers to an act of terrible desperation, which catapults them headlong into a world more claustrophobic than the one they sought to destroy. This English version of Thérèse Raquin was first staged at the National Theatre, London, in 2006.

Read more less

A two-play dramatisation of Philip Pullman's extraordinary award-winning fantasy trilogy, first seen at the National Theatre. His Dark Materials takes us on a thrilling journey through worlds familiar and unknown. For Lyra and Will, its two central characters, it's a coming of age and a transforming spiritual experience. Their great quest demands a savage struggle against the most dangerous of enemies. They encounter fantastical creatures in parallel worlds – rebellious angels, soul-eating spectres, child-catching Gobblers and the armoured bears and witch-clans of the Arctic. Finally, before reaching, perhaps, the republic of heaven, they must visit the land of the dead. This adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, by Nicholas Wright, was first performed at the National Theatre in London in 2003.

Read more less

‘I don’t know how I became so filled with hate. I find it shocking that I did. Somebody said to me that war affects us in all kinds of ways, and that drinking is only one of them. Perhaps hating people is another. Perhaps sex is too.’ 1943, Henley-on-Thames. Miss Roach is forced by the war to flee London for the Rosamund Tea Rooms boarding house, a place as grey and lonely as its residents. From the safety of these new quarters, her war effort now consists of a thousand petty humiliations, of which the most burdensome is sharing her daily life with the unbearable Mr Thwaites. But a breath of fresh air arrives in the form of a handsome American lieutenant and things start to look distinctly brighter. Until a new boarder moves into the room next to Miss Roach’s – outwardly friendly, she soon starts upsetting the precarious balance in the house. Nicholas Wright’s play The Slaves of Solitude weaves a fascinating blend of dark hilarity and melancholy from Patrick Hamilton’s much-loved story about an improbable heroine in wartime Britain. The play premiered at Hampstead Theatre, London, in October 2017.

Read more less