The Theatre of Laura Wade

(Hardback)

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The first full-length exploration of the work of Laura Wade, providing critical and performance perspectives on one of the UKs most frequently staged female playwrights.

Laura Wade is one of the most exciting, challenging and commercially successful playwrights in the UK. Her work has been widely translated and performed across the globe; but despite the prolific appearance of her plays on professional stages, in university studios and school classrooms, she is a writer who is yet to have a full-length book dedicated to her work. This book remedies this situation by providing a detailed exploration of Wades award-winning oeuvre.

Throughout the volume, key creative practitioners add rehearsal room insight, alongside the perspective of Laura Wade herself. Regular collaborators Tamara Harvey, Katherine Parkinson, Lyndsey Turner and Samuel West provide perspectives on Wades work, including the Olivier Award-winning Home, Im Darling, the frequently staged Alice and her inventive adaptation of The Watsons. Actor Natalie Dormer also provides new insights which connect together Posh and the subsequent film adaptation, The Riot Club.

Teachers, lecturers and theatre makers are given resources to explore Wades plays in detail, including Posh, with key thoughts from the original productions director as well as Cressida Carr, director of the first all-female production in 2017. Those staging or studying the increasingly popular early works, Breathing Corpses, Colder than Here and Other Hands, have access to fresh scholarship deconstructing the narrative ingenuity and dark themes contained within these plays. Each chapter draws attention to the range of international and performance contexts from which the plays can be explored.

Author Bio

Henry Bell is Senior Lecturer in Performance at University of the West of Scotland, UK where he also fulfils the role of Arts Lead of the Division of Arts and Media. Prior to academia, he worked as a literary manager, professional theatre director and applied theatre practitioner at a variety of organisations including Orange Tree Theatre (2009-2013) and Stephen Joseph Theatre (2013-2016). He edited and provided the introduction for the student edition of Posh published by Methuen Drama in 2024.

Sophie Bush is an Associate Head in Sheffield Creative Industries Institute, Sheffield Hallam University, UK. She is the editor of student editions of Our Countrys Good (2020), Top Girls (2018) and My Mother Said I Never Should (2015), and a GCSE Student Guide to My Mother Said I Never Should (2015), all published with Methuen Drama. She is also the author of The Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker (Methuen Drama, 2013).