Book description
This second collection of plays by Simon Stephens, winner of the 2005
Olivier Award for Best New Play for On the Shore of the Wide World,
perfectly showcases the development of one of the most exciting and
impressive theatre talents of recent years. The range of plays in this
volume displays a tough sensibility and a courage to confront the more
unsettling challenges of our times. One Minute, first produced in 2003
and revived in London in 2008, has an uncomfortable resonance as it
follows five characters variously affected by the disappearance of
Daisy, an 11-year-old girl, from Seven Dials, Covent Garden. Country
Music spotlights four fateful moments in the life of Jamie Carris during
and after the prison sentences he has served for glassing one man and
for killing another. Motortown, written in response to the War on
Terror, is a blistering account of a young soldier's return home from
Basra to an England he no longer recognises or connects with.
Pornography captures Britain as it crashes from the euphoria and promise
of the 2012 Olympics announcement into the devastation of the London
bombings of 7/7. The final play, Sea Wall, is a one-act monologue about
grief, following the drowning of a young child. Simon Stephens has
been the recipient of both the Pearson Award for Best New Play 2001-2
for his play Port, and the Olivier Award for Best New Play 2005 for On
the Shore of the Wide World. His most recent major play, Pornography,
was produced at the 2008 Edinburgh Festival.
