I drank three glasses of scotch and ginger ale before we'd even cleared Coney Island. I didn't want to come home. It was then that I decided to write you these letters.On a crisp winter day in New York, Willem gets the call. It's Mum. Pauli's died. Come back to Amsterdam.An unforgettable homecoming to an estranged family, a lost love, unsettling sex and an unexamined life.One of Stephens's most poetic plays to date, Song from Far Away received its ...

'Everything human beings do finishes up bad in the end. Everything good human beings ever make is built on something monstrous. Nothing lasts. We certainly won't...'Based on his experience as a teacher, Stephens describes his play as 'The History Boys on crack'. It explores the underlying tensions and potential violence in a group of affluent, articulate seventeen year old students. Contemporary and unnerving, with elements of The Catcher in the Rye, Punk Rock...

2014 was a spectacular year for playwright Simon Stephens, who has been described by the Independent as 'a brilliant writer of immense imagination' and by the Financial Times as having 'emerged in this millennium as an outstanding playwright'.2014 was a year for Simon Stephens which featured a high number of world premiere plays including one for the theatre of his birthplace, Manchester's Royal Exchange, a major new play for the Downstairs space at London's Royal Court, and a Chek...

There's a hole running through the centre of my stomach. You must have all felt a bit awkward because you can probably see it.Sea Wall is a delicate monologue, completely devastating and beautifully powerful.Alex's story, spoken directly to the audience, begins full of clear light and smiles, as he speaks about his wife, visiting her father in the South of France, having a daughter, photography, and the bottom of the sea. His tone is natural, happy and eng...

Is this the strangest thing that two people have ever done in the history of the world?In this uncertain world, who can predict what brings people together? When two strangers meet by chance amidst the bustle of a crowded London train station, their lives are changed forever.Multi-award-winning British playwright Simon Stephens brings his hit Broadway play to London for the first time. Brimming with blazing theatrical life it explores the uncertain and often comica...

My name is Christopher John Francis Boone. I know all the countries of the world and the capital cities. And every prime number up to 7507.Christopher, fifteen years old, stands beside Mrs Shears's dead dog. It has been speared with a garden fork, it is seven minutes after midnight, and Christopher is under suspicion. He records each fact in the book he is writing to solve the mystery of who murdered Wellington. He has an extraordinary brain and is exceptional at maths, bu...

Dramatic new play of crime and redemption by winner of Pearson Most Promising New Playwright Award, 2001A story of crime and redemption, starting at the mouth of the River Thames and moving across England over twenty years. It begins with a life choice for Jamie Carris and ends with a re-union with his young daughter. It is also a story about a killer.

First collection from the 2004 Pearson Award-winning playwrightSimon Stephens Plays: 1 brings together four of the early plays from the winner of the 2002 Pearson Best New Play Award. Since Bluebird in 1998, Stephens has gained recognition for humane plays that display a sharp observation and compassionate response to the lives of ordinary people in urban locations.Bluebird: Cabbie Jimmy overhears the weird, wonderful and violent tales of his passengers he c...

If you go, I don't think you should come back.On a startlingly bright autumn night in 2006, Harper Regan walked away from her home, her husband and daughter, and kept walking. She told nobody that she was going. She told nobody where she was going. She put everything she ever built at risk. For two lost days and nights, until it looked as though her entire life might unravel, she didn't turn back.From Uxbridge to Stockport to Manchester and back again,

“t was then that I decided to write you these letters.One crisp winter day in New York, Willem receives a phone call – it's time to go home.Home to Amsterdam – to an estranged family and forgotten relationships. As he reflects on his life, unwilling to face the future, he finds himself reaching out to the brother he has lost.This revised edition of Simon Stephens's landmark play, is published to coincide with the revival at HOME Manchester, February 2023, st...

"Stephens writes dramas set in uncaring, uncompromising worlds, whose characters speak in a language at once naturalistic and yet artificially pared-down and whose uncertain attempts to assert their own identities sometimes lead to gratuitous and brutal acts of violence." - Financial TimesA fifth collection of plays by one of Britain's most prolific contemporary playwrights, Simon Stephens, charting his work from 2011-2016, ranging from London's Royal Court Theatre...

Four plays inspired by and originating on the European stage from one of Britain's most important playwrights.Three Kingdoms was presented at Teater NO99 in Tallinn, Estonia on 17 September 2011, before opening at the Munich Kammerspiele, Germany, on 15 October 2011. 'An inconsolable mood of dread, abandon, violence and suspicion lurks beneath the show's skin of arty insouciance, and at times the script attains a lyrical pitch of accusation against the West that quite over...