Royal Court Playwright’s Podcast

S4 EP6: Sabrina Mahfouz talks to Simon Stephens

Released 24 Jan, 2020: 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.
 

S4 Ep 5: Jack Thorne talks to Simon Stephens

Released 17 Jan, 2020: 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.
 
 

S4 Ep4: David Ireland talks to Simon Stephens

Released 10 Jan, 2020: David Ireland is a man whose family name 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.
 
 

S4 Ep3: Stef Smith talks to Simon Stephens

Released 3 Jan, 2020: 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.

S4 Ep2: Christopher Hampton talks to Simon Stephens

Released, 27 Dec 2019: 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.
 

S4 Ep1: Gurpreet Kaur talks to Simon Stephens

Released 20 Dec, 2019: 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).
 

S3 Ep6: Zinnie Harris talks to Simon Stephens

Released Feb 8, 2019: 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.
 
 

S3 Ep5 Winsome Pinnock talks to Simon Stephens

Released Feb 1, 2019: The debt that recent years of black British playwrights owe 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.
 
 

S3 Ep4: Peter Gill talks to Simon Stephens

Released Jan 25, 2019: 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.
 
 

S3 Ep3: David Eldridge talks to Simon Stephens

Released Jan 18, 2019: 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.