Chris O'Connell

Chaotic, fast, and furious, "Zero" is the new play from multi award-winning Theatre Absolute.

Can a family find hope for the future? Chris O'Connell's compelling new play explores the possibility that love might return, and redemption be found, for a couple whose lives have been battered by the experience of parenting a violent son. "Lenny Pope's bad. Everyone knows what he did, 'Hang Lenny Pope.'...I saw it written on a wall." Both touching and funny, "Hang Lenny Pope" is an urban love story with a truly macabre twist. An inspiring, hard-edged and enthralling production by Theatre Absolute, "Hang Lenny Pope" is on a national tour from March to May 2007.

Frantic Assembly celebrates its 10th anniversary with a revival of the hugely popular and spectacularly physical Hymns, once again teaming up with Chris O'Connell (script), Natasha Chivers (lighting) and celebrated director Liam Steel.Four men reunite to mourn the loss of a close friend, but time and events have had a corrosive effect on this once tight-knit bunch. From beneath the surface bravura a brooding animosity emerges. Their struggle to deal with grief and guilt brings them to breaking point ahere the truth lies waiting.With it's touching depiction of friendship under fire, Hymns wowed critics and audiences on its first run. Recharged and revamped it exploded on a celebratory and select UK tour in March 2005.

The plays in O'Connell's trilogy portray the vulnerable and the violent as they lash out against the world around them. From the adrenaline-fuelled anarchy of a car theft and the ritualized violence of teenage gangs, to the new beginning offered by a baby in the womb, life on the dirty side of the tracks is shown without compromise or sentimentality.