Joe Penhall

The Methuen Drama Book of 21st Century British Plays showcases five of the best new plays from the first decade of the twenty-first century. A perfect reminder of the relevance, vitality and innovation of British theatre, this collection represents some of the most exciting plays to emerge in recent years. Joe Penhall's multi-award-winning Blue/Orange was heralded as 'one of the best new plays in the National's history' (Sunday Times). Set in a mental hospital it provides a riveting exploration of racism, health and power, and was the winner of the Olivier Award for Best New Play 2001. Elmina's Kitchen by Kwame Kwei-Armah, about gun crime and the struggle to make a living on Hackney's Murder Mile, marked the emergence of a major new writing talent. 'An exquisite tragi-comedy for our times' (Herald) Neilson's Realism dramatises the everyday life and increasingly bizarre fantasies and thoughts of its protagonist with comic zeal and inspired inventiveness. Gone Too Far! explores a London community divided by race and prejudice. The first play to be written about the London 7/7 terrorist bombings, Simon Stephens' Pornography tells seven entwining stories of people's lives during the day leading up to the catastrophic event.

Celebrating 10 years of the London New Play Festival, featuring six plays: Wild Turkey by Joe Penhall: Two small businessmen struggle to keep their flagging burger bar afloat, in the face of increasingly savage and bizarre forces. Everlasting Rose by Judy Upton: Terrified of ageing, a caravan Casanova changes wives every decade, until a woman of the 90's challenges his routine. Strindberg Knew My Father by Mark Jenkins: Life becomes farce as Strindberg loses control over his characters while writing 'Miss Julie'. In the Fields of Aceldama by Naomi Wallace: When their only child dies in an accident, Mattie and Henry draw on her spirited past to find the strength to go on. Two Horsemen by Biyi Bandele: Baja and Langbaja trade stories about life, sex and god in a run-down shack. Will their stories sustain them, or trap them forever? Maison Splendide by Laura Bridgetman: House-sitting for gangsters, Honey and Moon enact a 'let's pretend' lesbian white wedding, parodying suburban customs.

The third volume in an anthology series of the most original and exciting new plays for the nineties Europe, set in an international rail station linking several countries examines the cultural shifts of the post Berlin wall years and is "a fierce, compassionate mightily ambitious drama...There is a sharp analytic intelligence...about this gripping play." (The Scotsman) Uganda is set in a front sitting room but explores children's love of their fathers, it won the Thames Television Best Play Award in 1994 and "confirms my feeling that Johnson is on the threshold of great things" (Guardian). Some Voices by Joe Penhall, looks at mental illness and the love between two brothers (it has since been made into a feature film), it is "haunting and jazzily contemporary. Penhall's post-Pinter is promising" (Observer). Ashes and Sand reflects on the world of school leavers in England's "Deep South" and won the George Devine Award in 1994: "Judy Upton's vicious little hand grenade of a play...takes us into the bleak world of a violent girl gang living in a seaside resort." (Independent)

I am not your punch bag! I am a Member of Parliament!An MP with an instinct for compassion. An ex-serviceman with a life in free fall. And a parliamentary protection officer who’s having none of it.? This volatile new play by Olivier Award-winner Joe Penhall deconstructs politics, panic alarms and the conflict between public service and personal safety.? Published to coincide with the world premiere at London's Old Vic starring Anna Maxwell Martin and James Corden in June 2024.

‘Music is medication. The elixir of life. It’s for injecting into the blood stream to take away the pain…to promote euphoria…to adrenalise us and give us courage and fortitude’In a top London recording studio, Cat, a young songwriter, her producer Bernard, their lawyers and psychotherapists go to battle over who owns a hit song. Amidst a gathering storm of bitter complaints and brutal recriminations Cat and Bernard inflict a devastating toll on each other in a war that only one of them can win.‘The music industry isn't about healing heartbreak and vulnerability. It's about selling it’A sly, wry exploration of the dark side of the music industry by the multi-Olivier Award-winning writer of Sunny Afternoon and Blue/Orange, Joe Penhall.This edition was published alongside the world premiere at The Old Vic, London in April 2018, directed by Roger Michell.

You'll never keep me locked up, white man. This is one nigga you don't get to keep, white man. Cos I'm gonna bark every time you come near. D'you understand?Christopher has been confined to a psychiatric ward for a month. He wants out. The problem is he still thinks oranges are blue. His doctor, convinced he needs help, wants to section him. The senior consultant thinks it’s all a question of culture: at home in Shepherd’s Bush, Christopher will be amongst 'people who think just like him'. And besides, it costs taxpayer money to keep Christopher in care.Race, ethics, sanity and prejudice collide in Joe Penhall’s exquisitely sharp 'state-of-the-nation' classic. Blue/Orange was first performed at the Cottesloe Theatre, National Theatre, in April 2000. This edition has been published to coincide with the Young Vic's revival production in 2016.

In a London psychiatric hospital, an enigmatic patient claims to be the son of an African dictator - a story that becomes unnervingly plausible. An incendiary tale of race, madness and a Darwinian power struggle at the heart of a dying National Health Service, Blue/Orange premiered at London's Cottesloe Theatre in April 2000 and transferred to the West End in 2001.Award-winning writer Joe Penhall first rose to prominence in 1994 with his Royal Court play Some Voices and he has been described by the Financial Times as 'one of the finest playwrights of his generation.' Blue/Orange is an accessible and vibrant play, which explores a number of important issues and which makes it a good choice to study. This includes themes of race and representation, sanity and insanity (and in particular the social structures, stigma and complexity surrounding schizophrenia), as well the political context of New Labour and spin, and questions of prejudice and difference.This Student Edition features expert and helpful annotation, including a scene-by-scene summary, a detailed commentary on the dramatic, social and political context, and on the themes, characters, language and structure of the play, as well as a list of suggested reading and questions for further study and a review of performance history.

The birth of their daughter should be one of the happiest days of Ed and Lisa's life. An NHS maternity ward and their somewhat unusual circumstances make for an unsettling and satisfyingly comic sequence of events that tests their relationship to the core, and raises intrinsic questions about the nature of birth and renewal, fear and isolation.Subverting the received gender roles to darkly comic and disturbing effect, the play charts Ed and Lisa's personally fraught experience at the behest of an NHS labour ward. Penhall expertly weaves an acutely funny and emotionally charged sequence of events: he pitches wryly observed gender perceptions of a quite literal life and death situation against an indictment of the NHS system. The beautifully observed writing is at once vicious and searingly tender.Birthday achieves an intensely comic counterpoint to teh visceral domestic drama sutured to bigger issues of aspiration, sacrifice, who we are, how we communicate, the triumph of tolerance, nature and ultimately love.

We have the tools to enlighten and yet our world is darkening. We live in an era of pessimism and worry; we are hollowed out, lurching from crisis to crisis, with no faith that anything will improve, and no great hopes to sustain us. So what's the answer?A small boy is driving his mother to distraction - waking at night, hearing phantom noises and fixating on his absent father.Douglas attends an innocuous motivational course involving esoteric philosophy and mysteriously abandons his wife and child to "live in a specific, pre-ordained way according to the tenets of a spiritual leader." Is it a predatory cult or the solution to all their problems? And how can a small child be expected to understand adult thinking at its most complex and self-destructive?His first dramatic work since 2007, Haunted Child marks the return to the stage of multi-award winning playwright and screenwriter Joe Penhall. With his trademark dark humour and sly observation, he poignantly explores the gulf between childhood and adulthood and asks disturbing questions about the lure of spiritual release in increasingly difficult times.

Joe Penhall's screenplay for the film of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel provides a gripping and unforgettable text for use in English at Key Stage 4. The novel won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the the film starring Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron won praise for its faithful rendering of the novel's dystopian vision. This educational edition in Methuen Drama's Critical Scripts series has been prepared by national Drama in Secondary English experts Ruth Moore and Paul Bunyan. Building on a decade of highly effective work and publications endorsed by national organisations and supported by teachers and consultants across Britain, each book in the series:meets the new requirements at KS3 and GCSE (2010) features detailed, structured schemes of work utilising drama approaches to improve literary and language analysis places pupils' understanding of the learning process at the heart of the activities will help pupils to boost English GCSE success and develop high-level skills at KS3 will save teachers considerable time devising their own resources. The Road is set a few years after an unexplained cataclysmic world disaster has left the earth barren and hostile. It follows a father and son as they struggle to survive in a landscape where men either starve or join the marauding gangs of cannibals. Readers are advised that there are some scenes of a disturbing nature.

"You think I come from another world, don't you? Filled with all these strange things you've never seen...Well I do, I guess." Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006. Released shortly after his No Country for Old Men was turned into an Oscar-winning film, The Road's cinema version of the novel is directed by John Hillcoat, stars Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron and is an official selection for the 66th Venice Film Festival 2009. Joe Penhall's adaptation is a faithful, careful crafting of the book for the screen, fully evoking the atmosphere of menace and desperation. The Road is set a few years after an unexplained cataclysmic world disaster has left the earth poisoned, barren and hostile. While ash blocks out the sun and the earth no longer fosters plant or animal life, men either starve or join the maruading gangs of cannibals. The plot follows an unnamed father and son on a bleak epic across the wasteland and features a series of horrifc encounters in a merciless world starved of life and hope. This edition includes a full list of cast and crew credits.

Penhall's 1994 play Some Voices was described as 'the most thrilling playwriting debut in years' by the Sunday Times. He has consistently lived up to and exceeded that early promise as the plays in this second volume of his work testify. Characterised by a taut mood, a grappling with moral dilemmas, and tough, eloquent dialogue, punctuated by outrageously comic moments, the plays in this volume are: Blue/Orange: An incendiary tale of race, madness and power set in a psychiatric hospital. 'Britain's best new play since Michael Frayn's Copenhagen ...thrillingly original' Financial Times Dumb Show sees TV star Barry caught in a tense game of manipulation and entrapment in this satire on the fame game and the media industry: 'Penhall brings the same sharpness and wit to Dumb Show that he did to his hugely successful Blue/Orange' The Times Wild Turkey (1993): a characteristically taut work about the acrimonious relationships of people in a late-night burger bar. 'More than any of his peers Penhall has shown a rare aptitude for confronting headline issues of the day, using his gift of the gab as a dramatist to interrogate their underlying complexities and contradictions' Daily Telegraph

"'Qualms?' Oh yeah, sure, I have 'qualms'. Everybody has qualms. But I'll overcome them." To his family's horror, Ned reveals he's the brains behind a new military technology so sophisticated, so extraordinary, it will revolutionise the nature of warfare. It's only when the Ministry of Defence demands intellectual ownership that Ned begins to question himself, resisting the might of the weapons industry with frightening consequences. Landscape with Weapon is a wry account of private anguish, public responsibility and a problem with no solution. The play premiered at the National Theatre on 20 March 2007. Joe Penhall's previous work for the National Theatre, Blue/Orange, was the winner of the Olivier Awards Best Play (2001), the Evening Standard Award Best Play (2000), and the Critics Circle Award Best Play (2000).

Barry's fifteen minutes of infamy are overdue, and when laughter's your living ...that's no joke. Courted at the end of his show by bankers John and Jane, TV star Barry believes he is to get the 5-star treatment that he deserves. However urged to provide a candid account of his off-stage life and views, the Barry that emerges is the least of the surprises in the tense game of power and manipulation that ensues.

"Joe Penhall belongs to the new wave of dramatists that has flooded British theatre with exciting work in recent years ...I have a hunch that his might prove the more enduring talent" (Daily Telegraph) Some Voices: 'The most thrilling playwriting debut in years...The writing is razor-sharp, sensitive, quietly eloquent, full of the touchingly drab poetry of lost lives' (Sunday Times); Pale Horse: 'His second Court play is as compelling and extraordinary as his first ...as taut, tight and atmospheric as Macbeth' (Observer); Love and Understanding: 'This is one of the best plays I've seen, ever, at this powerhouse of new writing ...tough, eloquent, bruising' (Sunday Times); The Bullet: 'A Death of a Salesman for Britain in the nineties, and it is typical of Penhall's grace as a writer that it consciously echoes Arthur Miller while also emerging as an entirely distinctive work' (Daily Telegraph)

"Joe Penhall belongs to the new wave of dramatists that has flooded British theatre with exciting work in recent years ...I have a hunch that his might prove the more enduring talent" (Daily Telegraph) Some Voices: 'The most thrilling playwriting debut in years...The writing is razor-sharp, sensitive, quietly eloquent, full of the touchingly drab poetry of lost lives' (Sunday Times); Pale Horse: 'His second Court play is as compelling and extraordinary as his first ...as taut, tight and atmospheric as Macbeth' (Observer)