Authors

Enda Walsh

Enda Walsh is a multi-award-winning Irish playwright. He lives in London. His work has been translated into over twenty languages and has been performed internationally since 1998.

His recent plays include: Medicine at the 2021 Edinburgh International Festival and Galway International Arts Festival; Arlington at the 2016 Galway International Festival; an adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Twits for the Royal Court (2015); Ballyturk and Room 303 at the 2014 Galway International Arts Festival; Misterman, presented by Landmark Productions and Galway International Arts Festival in Ireland, London and New York (2011–2012); and several plays for Druid Theatre Company, including Penelope, which has been presented in Ireland, America and London, from 2010–2011, The New Electric Ballroom, which played Ireland, Australia, Edinburgh, London, New York and LA from 2008–2009, and The Walworth Farce, which played Ireland, Edinburgh, London and New York, as well as an American and Australian tour, from 2007–2010.

He collaborated with David Bowie on the musical Lazarus (New York Theatre Workshop, 2015, and West End, 2016), and won a Tony Award in 2012 for writing the book for the musical Once, seen on Broadway, in the West End and on a US tour.

His other plays include Delirium (Theatre O/Barbican), which played Dublin and a British tour in 2008; Chatroom (National Theatre), which played at the National Theatre and on tour in Britain and Asia (2006–2007); and The Small Things (Paines Plough), which played London and Ireland (2005).

His early plays include Bedbound (Dublin Theatre Festival) and Disco Pigs (Corcadorca).

His film work includes Disco Pigs (Temple Films/Renaissance) and Hunger (Blast/FILM4), winner of the Camera d'Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.

Enda Walsh
Penelope
Enda Walsh Plays: One
Disco Pigs & Sucking Dublin
Delirium
The New Electric Ballroom
bedbound & misterman: two plays
The Small Things
The Walworth Farce
The Ginger Ale Boy
Chatroom
How These Desperate Men Talk
Lynndie's Gotta Gun

Harriet Walter

Harriet Walter is a leading actor on stage and screen.

On stage, she has played many Shakespearean characters including Ophelia, Helena, Portia, Viola, Imogen, Lady Macbeth, Beatrice and Cleopatra (most of them for the RSC). She has also played Brutus, Henry IV and Prospero in all-female productions at the Donmar Warehouse.

She has played many other great classical stage roles, including the Duchess of Malfi (RSC), Hedda Gabler (Chichester and tour), Nina in Thomas Kilroy’s Irish version of Chekhov’s The Seagull with Anna Massey and Alan Rickman (Royal Court), Masha in Three Sisters (RSC; Olivier Award), Anna Petrovna in Ivanov with Ralph Fiennes (Almeida), Hester in The Deep Blue Sea (Theatre Royal Bath and tour), and Elizabeth I in Schiller’s Mary Stuart (Donmar Warehouse, West End, and Broadway; Evening Standard Award and Tony Award nomination). She has also performed in several contemporary classics including Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine (Royal Court), Harold Pinter’s Old Times (West End), Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (National), and as Linda in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman with Antony Sher (RSC, Stratford and West End).  

She has created roles in new plays including Arcadia by Tom Stoppard and Yasmina Reza’s Life x 3 (National), Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Three Birds Alighting on a Field (Royal Court), Stephen Lowe’s adaptation of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Joint Stock), Moira Buffini’s Dinner (National and West End), Simon Gray’s The Late Middle Classes, Stephen Poliakoff’s Sweet Panic, Tamsin Oglesby’s US and Them (Hampstead), and Clara Brennan’s Boa opposite her husband, Guy Paul (Trafalgar Studios).

Her films include The Sense of an Ending, Mindhorn, Denial, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Suite Française, Man Up, The Wedding Video, Young Victoria, Babel, Villa des Roses (British Independent Film Award nomination), Sense and Sensibility and Louis Malle’s Milou en Mai. Her television work ranges from The Imitation Game by Ian McEwan and The Cherry Orchard (both directed by Richard Eyre), The Price (Channel 4 and RTÉ), Harriet Vane in the BBC’s Lord Peter Wimsey series and The Men’s Room, via guest appearances in Inspector Morse, Waking the Dead, Spooks, Poirot, Midsomer Murders and New Tricks, to more recent appearances as D.I. Natalie Chandler in Law and Order: UK, Little Dorrit, Downton Abbey, Black Sails, Call the Midwife and as Clementine Churchill in the Netflix series The Crown.

She has written several books, including Brutus and Other Heroines and Other People’s Shoes (both published by Nick Hern Books), Macbeth (Faber and Faber’s ‘Actors on Shakespeare’ series) and Facing It: Reflections on Images of Older Women (Facing It Publications).

She is an Honorary Associate Artist of the RSC, an Honorary D.Litt at Birmingham University, and was awarded a CBE in 2000 and a Damehood in 2011.

Harriet Walter
Other People's Shoes
Brutus and Other Heroines
Brutus and Other Heroines - [SIGNED COPY]
Harriet Walter on Imogen

Zoë Wanamaker

Zoë Wanamaker is an American-British stage, television and film actress, who has worked extensively with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. A nine-time Olivier Award nominee, she has also received four Tony Award nominations for her work on Broadway, as well as playing numerous roles in film and television.

Zoë Wanamaker
Zoë Wanamaker on Beatrice

Joe Ward Munrow

Joe Ward Munrow is a playwright from Deptford, south-east London, who now lives in Liverpool. His plays include: The Legend of Ned Ludd (Liverpool Everyman, 2024); Screaming Heart, winner of the Mercury Weinberger Playwriting Prize; Blue (Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and Gate Theatre, London); Held (Liverpool Playhouse Studio, 2012; shortlisted for Royal National Theatre Playwright's Award); The Laundry (Brockley Jack, 2011; winner of the Brockley Jack's Write Now Award and the Commended Prize in BBC's Alfred Bradley Bursary Award 2011).

​His radio plays include The Busker (BBC Radio 4, 2016; selected for BBC Radio 4's Pick of the Week).

Joe Ward Munrow
Blue
The Legend of Ned Ludd

Jason Warren

Jason Warren is a London-based theatre director, dramaturg and practitioner. His work as a director and dramaturg includes Nerve/Jekyll and Hyde (UK tour), The Sacred Obscene (London and Edinburgh), Two Girls (Southwark Playhouse), and fourteen new plays under the banner of his previous company, AXIS Arts, focused exclusively on new writing, innovative formats and emerging artists. Under AXIS Arts and its predecessor AXIS Theatre, he produced the majority of his immersive work, including CaligulaAnima and #MSND. He also works regularly with marginalised voices, including work with disabled artists and in ex-conflict zones. He is a regular director at East 15 Acting School.

Jason Warren
Creating Worlds

Anne Washburn

Anne Washburn is an American playwright whose plays include: Antlia Pneumatica; Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play; Shipwreck; The Internationalist; The Communist Dracula Pageant; I Have Loved Strangers; The Ladies; 10 Out of 12; The Small; an adaptation of The Twilight Zone for the stage; and a trans-adaptation of Euripides' Orestes.

Antlia Pneumatica

Steve Waters

Steve Waters is a playwright whose plays include: The Last King of Scotland, adapted from the novel by Giles Foden (Sheffield Theatres, 2019); Limehouse (Donmar Warehouse, 2017); Temple (Donmar Warehouse, 2015); Why Can’t We Live Together? (Menagerie Theatre/Soho/Theatre503, 2013); Europa, as co-author (Birmingham Repertory Theatre/Dresden State Theatre/Teatr Polski Bydgoszcz/Zagreb Youth Theatre, 2013); Ignorance/Jahiliyyah (Hampstead Downstairs, 2012); Little Platoons (Bush Theatre, 2011); The Contingency Plan (Bush Theatre, 2009; revived in a new version at Sheffield Theatres, 2022); Fast Labour (Hampstead, in association with West Yorkshire Playhouse, 2008); Out of Your Knowledge (Menagerie Theatre/ Pleasance, Edinburgh/East Anglian tour, 2006-8); World Music (Sheffield Crucible, 2003, and subsequent transfer to the Donmar Warehouse, 2004); The Unthinkable (Sheffield Crucible, 2004); After the Gods (Hampstead Theatre, 2002); and English Journeys (Hampstead Theatre, 1998).

His writing for television and radio includes Safe House (BBC4), The Air Gap, The Moderniser (BBC Radio 4), Scribblers and Bretton Woods (BBC Radio 3).

He ran the MPhil in Playwriting at Birmingham University between 2006 and 2011, and is now Professor of Scriptwriting at the University of East Anglia, where he convenes the MA in Creative Writing: Scriptwriting programme. He is the author of The Secret Life of Plays, published by Nick Hern Books.

Steve Waters
The Secret Life of Plays
The Contingency Plan
Little Platoons
Fast Labour
World Music
The Unthinkable
On the Beach
Resilience
Ignorance/Jahiliyyah
Temple
Limehouse
Steve Waters: Shorts