L-R: Jade Lewis, Ben Ringham, me, Max Ringham, Shvorne Marks, Joby Waldman Last night at the BBC Audio Drama Awards, Exemplar, which I co-wrote with Ben & Max Ringham, won Best Series or Serial. The judges said: In a diverse field one entry was a standout. With strong performances from the entire cast and exceptionally detalled, evocative foley work, this was a fusion of form, content and medium: a credible world of political intrigue which demands further listening - with surprising plot twists often hanging on the evidence of audio files. For sheer originality, dramatie heat and techni ..read more

The wonderful Scotland-based writer Zinnie Harris has been quietly undoing the western theatrical canon for 20 years. She’s rewritten numerous classics from a feminist perspective from Aeschylus’s The Oresteia to Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. And the latest one is Macbeth (an undoing) which she has rewritten very strongly, bringing Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff far more into the centre of the action and engaging with the critical history of the play as well. It’s a sensationally smart piece of work. So I was very flattered when she asked if I’d like to write an essay to go in the published text. I be ..read more

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith (1866). Delaware Art Museum. I’ve done a translation of Remy de Gourmont’s play Lilith, a retelling of the Genesis story but incorporating the story of Lilith, Adam’s first wife… It is for a new collection of ‘Decadent’ plays, to be published by Methuen Drama in 2023/4. There was a reading of extracts from some of the plays in the collection at the Albany Empire in Deptford on 10 November 2021. They chose some of the scenes between Lilith and Satan, which are a wonderful vivid mixture of blasphemy, eroticism, and laughter. I gave an introduction to the pla ..read more

Exemplar, my crime serial, cowritten with Ben and Max Ringham has been shortlisted in TWO categories in the BBC Audio Drama Awards: Best Original Serial Best Use of Sound This is the longlisting; there are six awards in each category and I think at some point in February these lists get cut down to three. But it’s good to have got to this point anyway. The awards are given out on Sunday 19 March 2023 at the Radio Theatre, Broadcasting House ..read more

I’ve been on Douglas Schatz’s The Play Podcast before, talking about first A Doll’s House and then The Deep Blue Sea. He invited me on again to talk about Chekhov’s The Seagull, to coincide with its production by the Jamie Lloyd Company. You can hear it here: https://www.theplaypodcast.com/052-the-seagull-by-anton-chekhov/ We touch of several things; the strange mixture of comedy and despair, the symbolism of the seagull, the failed first production, Chekhov’s clashes with Stanislavski, the ensemble cast and more. Enjoy ..read more

My new drama serial, Exemplar, cowritten with Ben and Max Ringham, begins on BBC Radio 4 at 2.15pm on Friday 19 August, with each of the five episodes being broadcast weekly. The whole series is available to binge-listen on BBC Sounds. Exemplar follows Jess Carter, a forensic audiologist (i.e. an expert who examines sound to help solve crimes), as she investigates various sound clues that lead her to unexpected conclusions. She’s aided, slightly reluctantly, by her new trainee Maya Graham ..read more

So, You & Me won SILVER in the Radio Academy Audio and Radio Industry Awards. It was a fun and extremely long evening at the Adelphi Theatre hosted very brilliantly by Rylan and featuring dozens of people whose names and faces meant nothing to me and few people whose names and faces did including Heather Small, George the Poet, Cerys Matthews and George the Poet. I won Gold in the ARIAs once before, so clearly this is my lucky award show. Polly Thomas, my great producer, collaborator, and friend, and I have been nominated for awards loads of times for shows we’ve made together over the la ..read more

So You & Me has been shortlisted for the Radio Academy’s ARIA (Audio & Radio Industry Awards) for Best Fictional Storytelling. Excitingly, the ceremony is at the Adelphi Theatre on 3 May, hosted by Rylan and his magnificent flashing teeth. I only know two other entries in the shortlist, but if they are anything to go by, this is a strong list and it’s very flattering to be in their company. Atlantic: A Scottish Story - The Big Light Podcast Network Little Blue Lines - BBC Audio, for Radio 4 Poster Girl - Afonica, for BBC Radio 4 TakeOver - Goldhawk Productions, for BBC Radio 4 ..read more

There’s an interview with me in this new book: Svich, Caridad. Toward a Future Theatre: Conversations During a Pandemic. Methuen Drama, 2022. The book as a whole brings together dozens of theatre and performance makers to reflect on their experience of the pandemic and their thoughts about life and theatre after it. I rub shoulders with Tim Crouch, James Graham, Tarek Iskander, Chris Thorpe, Elizabethn Newman, Roy Alexander Weise, Eleanor Bishop, Tim Etchells, Eve Leigh, Tassos Stevens, Kia Corthron, Kaite O’Reilly, Roy Williams, Hassan Abdulrassak, Suba Das, Rajni Shah and dozens of others ..read more

My performance text from the mid-2000s, Here’s What I Did With My Body One Day, is finally being published as part of Alex Mermikides and Andy Lavender, eds. Lightwork: Texts on and from Collaborative Multimedia Theatre, Intellect, 2022, together with my short essay ‘On Not Writing Plays’. The book gathers together six texts produced by the company Lightwork from the early 2000s to the 2010s. I’m very proud of this play and I think it’s something that could easily have another life. That probably won’t happen right away because the first edition of this collection costs £80, but maybe when it ..read more