Overview
This is 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 book dedicated to her award-winning oeuvre. Throughout the volume, key creative practitioners add rehearsal room insight, alongside the perspective of Laura Wade herself and a foreword by Tamara Harvey, Co-Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Regular collaborators 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 staging in 2017. Those working with the increasingly popular early plays, Breathing Corpses, Colder than Here and Other Hands, have access to fresh scholarship deconstructing the narrative ingenuity and dark themes contained within. Each chapter draws attention to a range of international and performance contexts from which the plays can be explored.
Full Product Details
Author: Henry Bell (University of the West of Scotland) ,
Sophie Bush (Sheffield Hallam University, UK) ,
Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. (Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, USA) ,
Patrick Lonergan (University of Galway, Ireland)
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint: Methuen Drama
Dimensions:
Width: 13.80cm
, Height: 2.50cm
, Length: 21.60cm
Weight: 0.454kg
ISBN: 9781350282100
ISBN 10: 1350282103
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 19 February 2026
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
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Author Information
Henry Bell is Senior Lecturer in Performance at University of the West of Scotland, UK where he also fulfils the role of Arts Lead of the Division of Arts and Media. Sophie Bush is an Associate Head in the Sheffield Creative Industries Institute at Sheffield Hallam University, UK, where she oversees courses in Acting and Performance, Film Studies, and Film and TV Production.
