For twenty years Wende has been one of the most celebrated singers and performers in the whole of Europe. She released her first album in 2004 as a graduate from the Amsterdam Theatre School. The following seventeen years have seen her release nine more albums and tour the continent to sell out audiences. At the Royal Court in 2019 she debuted a remarkable exploration of the form of songwriting with The Song Project. It returns to the Royal Court this Summer 2021.

Royal Court Playwright's Podcast

Dutch Singer-Songwriter, Performer & Composer Wende talks to Simon Stephens

The theatre making duo made up of director Talia Paulette Oliveras and writer Nia Farrell, collectively known as TaNia, met while studying experimental and collaborative theatre making at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. The power of their theoretical rigour and the incision of their thought as a means of critiquing power was maybe developed at NYU, but there is no arid or academic crust to the work that TaNia first developed there: the visceral, playful, humane, angry, Afrofuturist theatre event Dreams in Blk Major.

S5 Ep5: Ta-Nia (aka Talia Paulette Oliveras & Nia Farrell) talk to Simon Stephens

Sam Max is in the early years of their working life but judging from the level of interest their work has provoked and from the depth and clarity of imagination that defines COOP, they are one of those writers whose work over the coming decade has the potential to allow us to reimagine ourselves as we come out of the pandemic.

S5 Ep4: Sam Max talks to Simon Stephens

Eve Leigh is a writer of range and conviction. Her theatre is built on an understanding of the importance of the presence of the audience in her work. She invents games for them to play. She imagines magic tricks for them to take part in. She makes music for them to listen to. In recent years her commitment to the investigation of issues of ability and access in the theatre have been integrated into her work in a way that is as theatrical and playful as it is serious and nuanced.

S5 Ep3: Eve Leigh talks to Simon Stephens

Quebecoise musician, artist, director, actor and writer Laurence Dauphinais has a body of work that is defined by its diversity. Her beautiful piece of documentary drama Aalaapi, which has been chosen for the 2020/21 Stückemarkt, was her debut as solo director. It premiered at the Centre du Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui (CTDA) in Montréal where it won the 2020 Playwright’s Prize.

S5 Ep2: Laurence Dauphinais talks to Simon Stephens

Over the course of the last decade Jude Christian has established herself as one of the most exciting directors, dramaturgs, and theatre makers in British theatre. She has written, developed and performed a quite shattering and unique piece of theatre. Nanjing dramatizes her own exploration of her own history.

S5 Ep1: Jude Christian talks to Simon Stephens

The audio play of A History of Water in the Middle East by Sabrina Mahfouz directed by Stef O’Driscoll is available to listen to now for 6 weeks.

Special Content: A History of Water in the Middle East – Audio Play

Playwright, poet, performer, presenter, screenwriter, anthologist and librettist Sabrina Mahfouz has written and produced up to twenty plays in the last ten years. She is a compelling performer, passionate and witty and savage and self-deprecating by turn, and her energy has driven one of the most dizzyingly prolific and formally surprising careers in contemporary British Theatre.

S4 Ep6: Sabrina Mahfouz talks to Simon Stephens

Jack Thorne has written the most popular play of the century, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. He has written for television, most recently with His Dark Materials, and won five Bafta Awards including for his series Shades and his remarkable collaboration with Shane Meadows that led to the This is England series 86, 88 and 90.

S4 Ep5: Jack Thorne talks to Simon Stephens

David Ireland is a man whose family names makes writing short essays about his paradoxical national identity, biography and work tremendously complicated. His 2016 play Cyprus Avenue directed by Royal Court Artistic Director Vicky Featherstone in a co-production between the Court and Dublin’s Abbey Theatre propelled Ireland to international attention.

S4 Ep4: David Ireland talks to Simon Stephens

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.

S4 Ep3: Stef Smith talks to Simon Stephens

Oscar nominee 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.

S4 Ep2: Christopher Hampton talks to Simon Stephens

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).

S4 Ep1: Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti talks to Simon Stephens

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.

S3 Ep6: Zinnie Harris talks to Simon Stephens

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.

S3 Ep5: Winsome Pinnock talks to Simon Stephens

Playwright Simon Stephens talks to some playwrights including Jez Butterworth, April de Angelis, Rachel De-lahey, Tanika Gupta, David Hare, Robert Holman, Dennis Kelly, Alistair McDowall, Anthony Neilson, Joe Penhall, Lucy Prebble, Anya Reiss, Polly Stenham and Enda Walsh.

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Royal Court Playwright's Podcast

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