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.

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.

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).

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.

The debt that recent years of black British playwrights owes 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.

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.

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.

Laura Wade's plays return to formal inventiveness with wit and imagination. This inventiveness is counterpointed by an insistent fascination with England as it struggles to define itself in the face of accelerating redundancy. This counterpoint has led to be one of the most exciting bodies of work in contemporary playwriting.

Jez Butterworth hasn’t written prolifically for theatre. In fact he has written seven stage plays in nearly twenty five years but three of them have been, arguably, the defining plays of their decade.

I first met Simon Stephens in 2011. I was an intern here at the Court and was tanning in the garden in my lunchbreak. Simon was here with his play Wastwater and was taking a moment’s break from rehearsals. I had watched a preview the night before.