On Paths of Ash is an extraordinary Australian World War II story. Robert and Jack Holman were working-class brothers who found themselves in three of the most horrific experiences of the war. They were interned in Changi prisoner-of-war camp, from where they became prison labourers on the infamous Burma Railway. From there they went as slaves to the coalmines of Japan, close enough to Nagasaki to see the mushroom cloud when the atomic bomb was dropped.This is Robert Holma...

A humane, funny and ultimately haunting play that explores masculinity, identity and what it means to be English.Over the course of a single day, two men share their solitude and unfold their secrets. They disagree with each other about women, about lust and about guilt. They question the power of magic, of redemption and the price of freedom, each seeing himself more clearly through the eyes of the other.Robert Holman's play Jonah and Otto premiered in 2008 at the...

Sisters Dolly and Esther grow up in ultra-conservative Harrogate in the 1960s. Fifty years later, following the death of their mother, Dolly comes to stay with Esther – now a successful novelist and living in Little Venice with her younger, inscrutable lodger, Jude. The three go to Norway to meet the rock-star grandfather Jude has only ever heard about. Instead, he meets Anila who changes his world. To make a new future, these four people will have to be honest, heal old wounds – and two s...

Robert Holman wrote plays of startling beauty, combining close observation of the way people behave with a thrilling and often fiercely uncompromising mastery of dramatic form. He is the playwright most admired by other playwrights. To Simon Stephens, he was, until Holman's death in 2021, 'My favourite living writer'.Here, in this selection from Holman's first decade of playwriting, a monkey is taken for a French spy by an eighteenth-century fishing community; the inhabitants of a ...

'Stagnant. It's stagnant. Seen more life in a dead rabbit.'A group of lonely people converge on the North Yorkshire moors, in Robert Holman's first full-length play.George, recently retired and grieving for his wife, has come on holiday to fish. Harold, son of the local squire, has come to shoot. Alan and Pauline have come to escape prying eyes.Hopes, dreams and fears play out in a Beckettian landscape as RAF fighter planes tear across the sky.Rober...

'History is not the study of facts. It is the study of ourselves. Of our stories. The stories we tell each other.'Nicholas Marks, an aspiring academic from Yorkshire, arrives on the Greek island of Tinos to interview reclusive scientist Daniel Howarth about his work on the atomic bomb. But as he tries to tease apart fact and fantasy, science and mythology, chance and destiny, Nicholas discovers a surprising truth about himself.Robert Holman's play The Overgrown...

'I came here for the future. If you can't see a future, what can yer see? Nothing.'From the lawns of King's College, Cambridge, where two shy young men from opposing backgrounds confront the reality of their attraction to each other, to the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War, where courage, idealism and solidarity are tested in the furnace of conflict, Robert Holman's play Today is a panoramic study of life, desire and the search for a fundamental self in the m...

'When I was a lad, little kiddie, I had this dream. And that was to burn down the world. Smash it up.'A dark and disturbing portrait of mental illness, and its effects on a young family.Barry and Mary are expecting a child. Barry is a bus conductor, but he'd like to drive the bus one day instead. His mother keeps telling Mary that Barry's not right, and that she should leave him. But Mary chooses to stick with Barry, for better or in fact for worse.Robert H...

'If the French do come, it'll be on a night like this.'A gorilla is taken for a French spy by an eighteenth-century fishing community on the isolated North Yorkshire coast.Robert Holman's play explores the suspicions, antipathies and fears of the unknown that divide communities, and the bonds that can transcend those divisions.In the end 'we're equal when we die, except f'the coffin'.Other Worlds was first performed at the Royal Co...

In the haze of a late summer in a London garden, the apples have all fallen to the ground. It is the day of Daddy's funeral, and two orphans find themselves suddenly alone, with nobody to cling to but each other.Robert Holman's play A Breakfast of Eels was premiered at the Print Room at the Coronet, London, in March 2015. It won Best New Play at The Offies (the annual awards for Off-West End theatre) in 2016.

A gripping play about the nature of violence.15-year-old Kerry and her mum have moved to a council estate. Kerry hates it. She hates her mum's new man too. But when she meets a boy in the playground and asks him to do something about it, she finds herself adrift in a landscape of physical brutality, drugs - and, eventually, love.Robert Holman's play Holes in the Skin was first performed at the Chichester Festival Theatre in June 2003.

It's the hot, humid, sticky summer of 1977. At a popular birdwatching spot jutting out into the North Sea at the mouth of the Tees, Martin, Jack, Michael and Carol are staring out into the future, their lives intertwined.A friendship, a marriage, a holiday, and a death – the gatherings and departures that make us human. Robert Holman's richly resonant play is an uplifting portrait of human hope and vulnerability.German Skerries was first performed at the Bush Theat...