Royal Court Playwright’s Podcast

Released 26 July 2022: 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…’
 

Released 18 July 2022: 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.
 

Released 18 May 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.
 
 

Released 18 May 2021: 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.
 
 

Released 18 May 2021: 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.

Released 18 May 2021: 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.
 

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.
 

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.
 
 

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.
 
 

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.