The playwright Nick Payne started his professional career in London theatre in one of the most vital and fertile hotbeds of theatrical creativity in the city. Working at the National Theatre bookshop. He started writing at York University but it was after moving to the city and working at the bookshop that he wrote his first plays. Flourless and Lay Down Your Cross enjoyed readings at Soho theatre and the Royal Court respectively and SWITZERLAND was produced at the 2008 Hightide Festival.

It was 2009 that saw the production at the Bush theatre of the beautiful and beautifully titled If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet. I saw the play in its opening production and, directed by Josie Rourke, it broke my heart. It is a play of real intelligence and real humanity as two brothers struggle to make sense of their differences and make sense of their lives under the shadow of an encroaching ecological catastrophe. How do you live a life with grace when the world is edging closer to its end? It asked its questions with rigour and compassion. It is a beautiful play and was revived by Michael Longhurst in New York City a couple of years later starring Jake Gyllenhaal.

Payne followed If There Is with his debut production for the Royal Court Wanderlust directed by Simon Godwin the following year. He adapted Maurice Maeterlink’s Interior for the Gate, wrote one of the 66 Books in response to the King James Bible for the Bush and had his One Day When We Were Young staged at the Paines Plough Roundabout in its opening season in 2010.

But it was 2012’s Constellations, again directed by Michael Longhurst, and starring Sally Hawkins and Rafe Spall that really brought Payne to international attention. It charts the simple and moving story of two characters as they meet and fall in love, become a couple and deal with her terminal illness. But the play’s genius lies in its continual re-invention as, investigating the ideas of a theoretical multiverse, it stops and re-starts, positing re-imagined possibility after possibility. It is a play that is as funny as it is intelligent, as formally bold as it is emotionally truthful. It was produced in the West End and enjoyed a soaring revival on Broadway again with Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson.

Payne has performed his own work, the startling monologue The Art of Dying at the Royal Court in 2014 a brave consideration of the nature of our mortality. His plays Elegy and The Same Deep Water as Me saw him reunited with Josie Rourke, this time at the Donmar Warehouse. Incognito, a formally playful and inventive exploration of the relationship between the human brain and human behaviour, was staged at the Hightide Festival and then at the Bush Theatre and, along with the entire oeuvre of Ali MacDowall, marks yet another play that my eldest son Oscar prefers by some distance to anything I’ve ever written.

Payne has written for television, film and radio. He is a writer of rare compassion and boldness and it is a real pleasure to welcome him here to the Royal Court.

The career of Bola Agbaje launched with one of the most confident and exciting debut swaggers in playwriting this century. Another of the graduates of Leo Butler’s energetic Young Writers programme here at the Court in 2007,  Agbaje’s Gone Too Far followed two young brothers raised in two different continents – one, Yemi, in London and his elder brother, Ikudayis, raised a Yoruba speaker Nigeria. The play charts the tension of the cultural clash when Ikudayisi moves to live with Yemi in London. And then throws them out into a multi cultural capital that lacerates any notion of a shared black identity while celebrating the complicatedness of their humanity.

It was produced at 2007’s Young Writers Festival, won Agbaje an Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliated Theatre and was transferred to the Theatre Downstairs in 2008.

Agbaje followed Gone Too Far with 2010’s morality study Off The Endz. It charted the effects of Ashley Waters’s David returning from jail to explode the life of his middle class childhood friend Kojo. The play was received with real admiration for the rigour and honesty of Agbaje’s examination of the emotional consequences of structural racism and the way that can define and paralyse the lives of her protagonists.

2012’s Belonging, commissioned by British African theatre company Tiati Fahodzi, saw Agbaje move her focus into the world of Nigerian politics and the possibility of corruption and dignity alike in that country.

In the past five years Agbaje has written widely for theatre. She has seen her work staged at the Tricycle, the Riverside Studios, Oval House and Trafalgar Studios. Her most recent play Bitches, written for the National Youth Theatre, was performed at the Finborough. Over the past five years she has also established herself as a screenwriter of increasing confidence. A series of short films culminated in the feature release of her own adaptation of Gone Too Far. She has suggested that her ultimate ambition as a writer lies in writing for film.

Taking inspiration from the dramatic axis that spins from Nigeria to London – and her parents settling in England in the 80s – Agbaje is engaged in a bracing moral interrogation of the tensions between compromise and aspiration. As her characters make sense of what home is or how it is ever possible to live at home or leave it, Agbaje has become an iconic dramatist for an entire generation of young playwrights.

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Full introduction by Simon Stephens:

I first encountered the plays of Howard Brenton right at the beginning of my life as a playwright. Before I’d properly written anything of my own I saw a student production of his 1984 play Bloody Poetry. A dramatic and haunting consideration of the relationship between Percy and Mary Shelley and Lord Byron and Claire Clairmont, it was a play unlike any I’d seen at that time. It took a story that was familiar and infused it with a startling sense of linguistic urgency and political interrogation. It was a revelation to me as an eighteen year old that playwriting could synthesise such elements with such force.

Bloody Poetry is according to Wikipedia one of the fifty plays that Howard Brenton has written since his debut Ladder of Fools, completed while still an undergraduate at Cambridge in 1965. For half a century he has returned to the theatre with inspiring energy and imagination. At the end of the 60s he was part of the touring company Portable that brought new plays to areas of the country that had little engagement with them before. In Brassneck and Pravda he wrote, with David Hare, two of the great collaborative plays of the last few decades. Collaboration with other writers is something he has returned to. He was also an early collaborator with Max Stafford-Clark when his Joint Stock Company produced Epsom Downs in 1977.

Brenton was fundamental to the foundations of the National Theatre – Hare directed his Weapons of Happiness as the first commissioned play in the Lyttleton. In 1980, his Romans In Britain earned the ire of moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse and the play’s director was nearly taken to trial under the obscenity laws.  Brenton has returned repeatedly to this theatre over the course of the last fifty years. He has written new English language translations of masterpieces by Buchner and Brecht; Goethe and Strindberge. His plays have often dramatized lives that are known. While Bloody Poetry looked at Shelley his early Christie in Love remains a startling study of the killer John Christie.

In recent years, for the National Theatre, he has considered the lives of the apostle Paul and Harold Macmillan in Paul and Never So Good respectively. Brenton’s latest play The Blinding Light has just opened at the Jermyn Street Theatre and explores the desires and creative madness of August Strindberg.

He is a writer of linguistic steel and intellectual interrogation and a constant and searching voice in the territory of political drama. He was also one of the originating writers on television crime drama Spooks.

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Full introduction by Simon Stephens:

“The play that lives with me most this year, as I talk in August 2017,  is Alice Birch’s remarkable Anatomy of a Suicide. Produced in the late spring here at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs and directed with exquisite detail and elegance by Katie Mitchell, in its humane and fearless study of despair and love it feels like a thrilling continuation and extension of Alice Birch’s first seven years in playwriting.

Raised in the Birchwood Hall Commune in the Malvern Hills, Alice’s parents gave her and her sister the name Birch in honour of the celebrated Mansion community home. She first came to my attention in 2010. I was working with David Eldridge on A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky and he was raving about the most brilliant debut play he’d read in some time. A play called Little Light by a writer fresh out of University, Alice Birch. I met Alice at 1000 Stars. She sent me Little Light. And David was right. It was a play of extraordinary poise and wit; of real anger and strangeness. Her eye for alarming stage direction was matched only by the taut poise of her dialogue.

That play remained criminally unproduced for five years but she made her professional debut the following ear with the similarly arresting Many Moons at the Theatre 503. In the following years she wrote Astronaut in collaboration with the much vaunted Islington Community Theatre, wrote Little on the Inside for Clean Break and adapted Malcom Saville’s Lone Pine Club for Pentabus Theatre.

But it was the electric Revolt she Said, Revolt Again, written for the Royal Shakespeare Company, that saw her work reach outside of the studio theatres of London. A play that sparkled with savage wit and formal explosion and culminated in one of the most viscerally anarchic scenes I’ve seen at the Theatre Upstairs here, at the point when it visited in 2015, it marked the arrival on the national stage of a writer of real confidence. Her collaboration with Rash Dash We Want you to Watch was produced at the Temporary Space at the National Theatre and in 2015 she made the first of three shows with her hero and mentor Katie Mitchell. The poised, searing consideration of the sexual politics and isolation at the heart of Hamlet, Ophelia’s Zimmer was co-produced by Berlins Schaubuhne and the Royal Court. Alice’s adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s Shadow (Eurydice Speaks) was produced last year at the Schaubuhne and then in the spring, Anatomy of a Suicide.

Her work has been produced widely throughout Europe and recently at the urgent and super cool Soho Rep in New York.

Alice is a writer of exquisite poetry and unerring savagery. She returns again and again to excavate the violence of patriarchy in its many forms. She is also a writer of real wit and humanity and formal exploration and it is a real pleasure to welcome her here.”

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Introduction by Simon Stephens:

The plays of Tanika Gupta are as defined by a vitality and spirit of intelligent transgression as much as they are a piercing observation of the mores and tropes of the worlds that surround her. Born in 1963 in Chiswick, she studied History at Oxford University before working in a women’s shelter in Manchester and as a community worker in Islington. Throughout her childhood, her university and working life she continued to write. It was in 1996, when her play Skeleton was commissioned by the Soho Theatre Company, that she was able to commit to turning writing into her career. The following twenty years has seen a prolific explosion of work.

She has written or adapted over twenty plays and seen those plays staged in all of the major theatres in the United Kingdom: the National Theatre, The Royal Shakespeare Company, the Young Vic, Hampstead Theatre, Birmingham Rep and Sheffield Crucible amongst others. Her East End-based Bollywood musical play Wah Wah Girls played at Sadler’s Wells. This year she worked with new Globe Artistic Director Emma Rice as dramaturg on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She has written consistently for television and taught playwriting throughout the world.

Her 2006 play Sugar Mummies opened here at the Royal Court; a provocative and searching exploration of female sex tourism in the Caribbean. It is a play defined, I would argue, by three characteristics that return to her work. By examining the sub-culture of wealthy white women who tour developing economies in search of sex in exchange for financial favour, it subverted conventional narrative, put female characters in the centre of the stage and interrogated the extent to which identity is defined by or in defiance of race and ethnicity. She is a writer with a wily eye for bullshit and wily ear for dialogue who has dramatised England for a generation.