Author Bio
Features new plays by: Richard Bean, Simon Stephens, David Edgar, David Greig, Stephen Jeffreys, Ron Hutchinson, Amit Gupta, Joy Wilkinson, JT Rogers, Colin Teevan, Abi Morgan, and Ben Ockrent. Colin Teevan is a celebrated playwright, translator and writer for screen. His work has been produced by many leading theatres including the National, the Young Vic, the Soho Theatre and the National Theatre of Scotland. Colin's 2009 play, The Lion of Kabul, was produced as part of the Tricycle Theatre's Great Game festival on Afghanistan and was hailed as 'an inspirational highlight of the year' by The Independent. In the same year, he adapted Franz Kafka's Report to An Academy for the Young Vic, where it appeared as the critically-acclaimed play, Kafka's Monkey, as well as reviving the National Theatre of Scotland's production of his new version of Peer Gynt at The Barbican and, subsequently, on tour. In 2010 Kafka's Monkey was revived by The Young Vic at the Bouffes du Nord Theatre in Paris and The Great Game was revived by the Tricycle for an American tour. In 2011 Colin wrote an episode of the ITV drama Vera starring Brenda Blethyn and a two-part episode of ITV/RTE crime drama Single Handed. Colin was commissioned to write an original play There Was A Man, There Was No Man for the Tricycle as part of their 2012 season of plays entitled 'The Bomb'. Hull-born Richard Bean is one of the Britain's most exciting and prolific playwrights. Between 1989 and 1994 he worked as a stand-up comedian and went on to be one of the writers and performers of the sketch show Control Group Six (BBC Radio), which was nominated for a Writers Guild Award. His first full length play, Of Rats and Men was staged at the Canal Cafe and went on to Edinburgh. He adapted it for radio for the BBC and it was nominated for a Sony Award. His breakthrough play Toast found critical acclaim at the Royal Court Theatre in 1999. He has won the George Devine Award 2002 for Under the Whaleback, the 2004 Pearson Play of the Year Award for Honeymoon Suite and the Critics' Circle Award for Best New Play 2005 for Harvest. Oberon Books publishes his Plays One, Plays Two, Plays Three, England People Very Nice, London Assurance, The English Game, In the Club, The Big Fellah, The Heretic and his stage version of David Mamet's House of Games. He has also translated and adapted Moliere's The Misanthrope, published as The Hypochondriac, and Le Pub! by Serge Valleti. His new play One Man, Two Guvnors, based on The Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Goldoni, premiered at The National Theatre in May 2011, to a string of five star reviews, before transferring to the West End, then Broadway, after which it will return to the West End, later in 2012. One Man, Two Guvnors has also recently won the Critic's Circle and Evening Standard awards for Best New Play. DMW Greer was a naval aviator before becoming a writer. His 'Burning Blue' received two Olivier Awards and has been produced throughout the world, in cities including Johannesburg, Cape Town, Tel Aviv, Los Angeles and New York. He has adapted it into a screenplay for Working Title Films. 'Alice Virginia' was premiered at the Haymarket Theatre, Leicester in 1998. He has also written one screenplay, 'Ghosts', an adaptation of the Ibsen play. Ron Hutchinson is a winner of the George Devine and John Whiting new writing awards and was the Royal Shakespeare Theatre's writer-in-residence 1980-81. Author of the acclaimed West-End hit Rat in the Skull, which was revived in 1995, his latest theatre work includes an adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's Flight (Royal National Theatre, 1998), Burning Issues (Hampstead Theatre, 2000) and Beyond Beauty (Playbox Young People's Theatre, 2000). An Emmy Award-winning screenwriter, he lives in Los Angeles, where he works in television and feature films. Naomi Wallace's work has been produced in both the UK and the US. Her plays include 'One Flea Spare', 'In the Heart of America', 'Slaughter City', 'The Inland Sea' and The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek'. She is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, and the Obie Award. She is presently working on a commission for the Royal National Theatre and the Guthrie Theatre of Minneaopolis. Lee Blessing, a multi-award-winning playwright, has been a major force in post 1960s American theatre. Blessing's plays are considered by many critics to be truthful, oftencontroversial explorations in the variance of human relationships. His plays reach into the depth of human souls to find the underlying truths that bind people, no matter what their political viewpoint, sexual preference, ethnicity or gender. He has been awarded The American Theater Critics Circle Award, The Great American Play Award, and many others.Three of his plays have been cited in Time magazine's list of the year's Ten Best. Blessing heads the graduate playwriting program at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Blessing's work was first produced at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1982 and many of his subsequent scripts would premiere and find success regionally. His most notable plays include A Walk in the Woods (1988), dealing with the friendship that develops between an American and a Russian diplomat; Eleemosynary (1988), about three generations of independent women; and Cobb (2000), which explored the many facets of baseball legend Ty Cobb. David Edgar is a British playwright and author who has had more than sixty of his plays published and performed on stage, radio and television around the world, making him one of the most prolific dramatists of the post-1960s generation in Great Britain. He was resident playwright at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1974-5 and has been a board member with them since 1985. Awarded a Fellow in Creative Writing at Leeds Polytechnic, he was made a Bicentennial Arts Fellow (US) (1978-9). Edgar has enjoyed a long-term association with the Royal Shakespeare Company since 1976. He founded the University of Birmingham's MA in Playwriting Studies programme in 1989 and was its director until 1999. He was appointed Professor of Playwriting Studies in 1995. Profiled in Screen International's 'Stars of Tomorrow', Amit is a member of the Tricycle Theatre's Bloomberg Writer's Group. Press for Campaign (Included in The Great Game: Afghanistan): Amit Gupta's 'Campaign' is a dizzying, impeccably acted little exercise about an absurd scheme among British Foreign Office employees to recreate a chapter in Afghan history from the early 20th century for strategic purposes. - New York Times Stephen Jeffreys is one of Britain's leading playwrights. He is the author of more than twenty professionally produced plays including The Libertine and I Just Stopped By To See The Man (Royal Court and Steppenwolf, Chicago); Valued Friends and A Going Concern (Hampstead); and A Jovial Crew (RSC). For eleven years he occupied the key position of Literary Associate at the Royal Court, helping directors Max Stafford-Clark, Stephen Daldry and Ian Rickson to form the artistic policy of Europe's leading new writing theatre. Ben Ockrent studied at Leeds University and the University of East Anglia. His first play, The Pleasure Principle, was staged at the Tristan Bates Theatre in October 2007. Joy Wilkinson's plays include Now is the Time (Tricycle Theatre), The Sweet Science of Bruising (National Theatre Studio), Fair (Finborough Theatre, Trafalgar Studios & UK tour), Felt Effects (Verity Bargate Award winner, Theatre 503) and The Aquatic Ape (Edinburgh & New York). She also writes for radio and was a graduate of the BBC's first TV Writers' Academy.