The Theatre of Laura Wade

The first full-length exploration of the work of Laura Wade, providing critical and performance perspectives on one of the UK's most frequently staged female playwrights.

Laura Wade is one of the most exciting, challenging and commercially successful playwrights in the UK. Her work has been widely translated and performed across the globe; but despite the prolific appearance of her plays on professional stages, in university studios and school classrooms, she is a writer who is yet to have a full-length book dedicated to her work. This book remedies this situation by providing a detailed exploration of Wade's award-winning oeuvre.

Throughout the volume, key creative practitioners add rehearsal room insight, alongside the perspective of Laura Wade herself. Regular collaborators Tamara Harvey, Katherine Parkinson, Lyndsey Turner and Samuel West provide perspectives on Wade's work, including the Olivier Award-winning Home, I'm Darling, the frequently staged Alice and her inventive adaptation of The Watsons. Actor Natalie Dormer also provides new insights which connect together Posh and the subsequent film adaptation, The Riot Club.

Teachers, lecturers and theatre makers are given resources to explore Wade's plays in detail, including Posh, with key thoughts from the original production's director as well as Cressida Carré, director of the first all-female production in 2017. Those staging or studying the increasingly popular early works, Breathing Corpses, Colder than Here and Other Hands, have access to fresh scholarship deconstructing the narrative ingenuity and dark themes contained within these plays. Each chapter draws attention to the range of international and performance contexts from which the plays can be explored.