Joanna Laurens (born 21 April 1978) is an English playwright.
She read music at the Guidhall School of Music and Drama before moving to Belfast to read English at Queen's University Belfast before completing an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia in 2003.
Laurens' first play, The Three Birds (2000), opened at the Gate Theatre, London. [1] This was followed by Five Gold Rings (2003), at the Almeida Theatre, London, and Poor Beck (2004), at The Other Place in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Award include: Critics' Circle Theatre Awards for Most Promising Playwright (2000); Time Out award for Most Outstanding New Talent (2001); finalist & Special Commendation for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.
Dame Joanna Lamond Lumley is a British actress, presenter, former model, author, television producer, and activist. She has won two BAFTA TV Awards for her role as Patsy Stone in the BBC sitcom Absolutely Fabulous (1992–2012), and was nominated for the 2011 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for the Broadway revival of La Bête. In 2013, she received the Special Recognition Award at the National Television Awards, and in 2017 she was honoured with the BAFTA Fellowship award.
Brian Patrick Friel was an Irish dramatist, short story writer and founder of the Field Day Theatre Company. He had been considered one of the greatest living English-language dramatists. He has been likened to an "Irish Chekhov" and described as "the universally accented voice of Ireland". His plays have been compared favourably to those of contemporaries such as Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter and Tennessee Williams.
Stephen Rea is an Irish film and stage actor. Rea has appeared in films such as V for Vendetta, Michael Collins, Interview with the Vampire and Breakfast on Pluto. Rea was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for Neil Jordan's thriller The Crying Game (1992). He has had important roles in the Hugo Blick TV series The Shadow Line and The Honourable Woman, for which he won a BAFTA Award. In 2020, The Irish Times ranked Rea the 13th greatest Irish film actor of all time.
Irish literature is literature written in the Irish, Latin, English and Scots languages on the island of Ireland. The earliest recorded Irish writing dates from back in the 7th century and was produced by monks writing in both Latin and Early Irish, including religious texts, poetry and mythological tales. There is a large surviving body of Irish mythological writing, including tales such as The Táin and Mad King Sweeny.
Professor Frank McGuinness is an Irish writer. As well as his own plays, which include The Factory Girls, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, Someone Who'll Watch Over Me and Dolly West's Kitchen, he is recognised for a "strong record of adapting literary classics, having translated the plays of Racine, Sophocles, Ibsen, Garcia Lorca, and Strindberg to critical acclaim". He has also published six collections of poetry, and two novels. McGuinness was Professor of Creative Writing at University College Dublin (UCD) from 2007 to 2018.
Lauren Cecilia Fisher, known professionally as Lauren Laverne, is an English radio DJ, model, television presenter, author and singer. She was the lead singer and additional guitarist in the alternative rock band Kenickie. The group's album At The Club reached the top 10, although her greatest chart success came when she performed vocals on Mint Royale's single "Don't Falter". Laverne has presented numerous television programmes, including 10 O'Clock Live for Channel 4, and The Culture Show and coverage of the Glastonbury Festival for the BBC. She has also written a published novel entitled Candypop: Candy and the Broken Biscuits. She presents the breakfast show on BBC Radio 6 Music, and in 2018 became the host of the long-running radio show Desert Island Discs.
Timberlake Wertenbaker is a British-based playwright, screenplay writer, and translator who has written plays for the Royal Court, the Royal Shakespeare Company and others. She has been described in The Washington Post as "the doyenne of political theatre of the 1980s and 1990s".
Brad Fraser is a Canadian playwright, screenwriter and cultural commentator. He is one of the most widely produced Canadian playwrights both in Canada and internationally. His plays typically feature a harsh yet comical view of contemporary life in Canada, including frank depictions of sexuality, drug use and violence.
Gary Mitchell is a Northern Irish playwright. By the 2000s, he had become "one of the most talked about voices in European theatre ... whose political thrillers have arguably made him Northern Ireland's greatest playwright".
Nicholas Paul Enright AM was an Australian dramatist, playwright and theatre director.
Patrick Galvin was an Irish poet, singer, playwright, and prose and screenwriter born in Cork's inner city.
Raymond Henry Charles Warren is a British composer and university teacher.
Stella Frances Silas Duffy is a London-born writer and theatremaker. Born in London, she spent her childhood in New Zealand before returning to the UK.
Sarah Marie Jones is a Belfast-based actress and playwright. Born into a working-class Protestant family, Jones was an actress for several years before turning her hand to writing. Her plays have been staged on Broadway as well as across Ireland.
Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance: a play, opera, mime, ballet, etc., performed in a theatre, or on radio or television. Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been contrasted with the epic and the lyrical modes ever since Aristotle's Poetics —the earliest work of dramatic theory.
Lucy Prebble is a British playwright. She is the author of the plays The Sugar Syndrome, The Effect, ENRON and A Very Expensive Poison. For television she adapted Secret Diary of a Call Girl and co-created I Hate Suzie with her close friend Billie Piper. Since 2018, Prebble is Co-Executive Producer and writer on Succession.
theatre in decay is an independent theatre company operating in Melbourne, Australia. It was founded in 2000 by Robert Reid and Anniene Stockton. theatre in decay is a multi-award winning independent theatre company, which has produced over 30 unfunded original shows in various locations, in venues such as Arts Centre Melbourne, The Store Room, La Mama and Theatreworks, as well as pubs, subways, hotel bedrooms, city rooftops, alleys and inside cars parked on the street.
Sarah Frankcom is an English theatre director. She was an artistic director of the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester from 2008 to 2019, when she became director of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
Ridiculusmus is a British theatre company founded in 1992 by Angus Barr, Jon Haynes and David Woods. Their work has been described as "seriously funny," "Dadaist" and "physical theatre." Theatre critic Ian Shuttleworth said that Ridiculusmus is "not so much rough theatre as completely dishevelled." Since 1996, the company has been led by Haynes and Woods as co-directors, and although the majority of their stage works in recent years have been two-handers, they additionally work with a large pool of collaborators.
Caryl Lesley Churchill is a British playwright known for dramatising the abuses of power, for her use of non-naturalistic techniques, and for her exploration of sexual politics and feminist themes. Celebrated for works such as Cloud 9 (1979), Top Girls (1982), Serious Money (1987), Blue Heart (1997), Far Away (2000), and A Number (2002), she has been described as "one of Britain's greatest poets and innovators for the contemporary stage". In a 2011 dramatists' poll by The Village Voice, five out of the 20 polled writers listed Churchill as the greatest living playwright.