The Theatre of Simon Stephens

Abstract

Simon Stephens is one of Britain’s and arguably Europe's pre-eminent playwrights. He has garnered numerous awards for both his original works and his adaptations, with his adaptation of Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time winning 7 Olivier Awards including Best Play and enjoying acclaim on Broadway. In the first book to provide a critical account of the full variety of Stephens’s work, Jacqueline Bolton gives a detailed analysis of his plays and their production, reviews current discourses around his work and offers a framework for future enquiry. Essays from Basil Chiasson (University of Calgary), James Hudson (University of Lincoln) and Cristina Delgado-Garcia (Manchester Metropolitan University) provide additional international perspectives, while contributions from theatre practitioners Sean Holmes, Marianne Elliot, Sarah Frankcom and Sebastian Nuebling illuminate the work from a director’s viewpoint. Since the beginning of his professional career in 1998, Stephens's award-winning plays have been translated into over a dozen languages, been produced on four continents, and feature prominently in the repertoires of theatres across Europe. His collaborations with actors, directors, dramaturgs, designers, novelists, musicians and choreographers have produced a dramaturgically diverse body of plays, musicals, adaptations, texts and monologues. As Bolton demonstrates, this extensive oeuvre has been animated by a search for optimism within chaos and violence. In its coverage of work from 1998's Bluebird to Carmen Disruption in 2015, the Companion contextualizes Stephens's ouevre through his embrace of aesthetics and processes encountered in European theatre and, in particular, the impact this has had upon attitudes towards the function of writing and the role of the audience in live performance. The Companion serves as an engaging study of one of the most restlessly creative and important dramatists of our generation.