Philip Osment

One night, an off-duty police officer and a woman carrying a cat box meet on Beachy Head. Two disparate souls collide, and learn what it truly means to be touched by the magic of hope. Philip Osment’s final play, Can I Help You? is a magical realist examination of the role race and gender have to play in mental health and suicide.

1988. THATCHER’S BRITAIN.Seventeen-year-old Luke runs away to London – away from homophobic playground slurs, headlines that scream ‘Don’t Teach Our Children To Be Gay’ and a family who wouldn’t understand him – to Uncle Martin, who he once saw with his arms around another man at a march. In the capital, Mark is sacked because of fears about colleagues working with ‘someone like him’. His boyfriend, Selwyn, faces being beaten up both by the police and at home by his own stepbrother. Meanwhile, Debbie battles with her son, who doesn’t want to live with her and her girlfriend. And retired piano teacher Miss Rosenblum – who once found refuge in this country from a terror that swept away half her family in 1930s Vienna – has seen this sort of hatred and fear before.Soon, these individual stories – of first loves and old flames, alliances and abandonment, missed opportunities and new chances – intertwine to paint a vivid picture of Eighties Britain.This Island’s Mine was originally performed by Gay Sweatshop in 1988. Now, three decades after the introduction of Section 28 banning positive representations of homosexuality, Philip Osment’s passionate and lyrical play, of outsiders, exiles and refugees, is all too resonant.

Hearing Things explores the dilemmas of psychiatry from the points of view of patients, relatives and staff. Based on experiences of psychiatrists and patients, the ‘healthy’ and the ‘ill’, the play examines how and if people heal and recover inside institutions. As part of the research process, staff and patients at Homerton University Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital in south London took part in drama programmes creating characters and improvising scenes , with clinicians and those receiving treatment swapping roles. Using a unique collaborative process between patients, psychiatrists and mental health staff, Playing ON Theatre Company drew together the stories of those receiving and providing mental health care culminating in performances at the hospitals and in theatre spaces. At the Maudsley, as a result of taking part, two patient’s progress was so great that doctors allowed their early discharge.The script of Hearing Things was informed by these workshop programmes and by the participants.

On a dilapidated British farm in 1963, Morley is coping with puberty, the tangles of love within his family, and the desertion of his mother. He is attracted to Andy, one of the Scottish hitchhikers who have sought shelter at the farm. All is not, however, as it seems in this powerful play by the author of Flesh and Blood and The Dearly Beloved. Morley's habit of telling tales about his elders hastens a crisis.5 men

What happens when you're in a hole? What happens when that hole's inside you? What do you do you fill it with to make yourself feel whole? Last year, 3 teenagers emailed the 20 Stories High Theatre Company to ask them if they could make a play about their friend Holly. This is how it unravelled… 3 teenagers: …So that’s our story and we really want to tell it... and we want to act in it as well, and play ourselves… cos actors wouldn’t really be as convincing as us… 20 Stories High: It’s a very moving story… but we’re really busy at the moment and also, to be honest, you’re not really actors. 3 teenagers: But we really want to tell our story… it says on your website that “Everybody has a story to tell… and their own way of telling it…” 20 Stories High: …well, come back in a year, when we’re less busy, and let’s talk… One Year Later… We made the play with them… WHOLE Winner of the Writers' Guild Award for Theatre Play for Young People 2013.

Build your child’s reading confidence at home with books at the right level Stumbling upon a hidden and forgotten garden, three young friends find themselves transported to World War One, and caught up in the shocking truth of young soldiers sent to fight for their country. Beautifully illustrated by Kate Greenaway winner Michael Foreman, this thought-provoking play helps to bring the First World War into modern day. Diamond/Band 17 books offer more complex, underlying themes to give opportunities for children to understand causes and points of view.A playscriptCurriculum Links: History: What was it like to live here in the past?This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

Looking for relief from boredom, seven young fathers in prison sign-up for an education program. They try to use the workshops to settle scores and to rise up the prison pecking order. But they're confronted with more than they'd bargained for, as they face up to their relationships with their children and and their own fathers.

This is a collection of three thirty-minute plays by leading playwrights for children to perform, commissioned by the Unicorn. Class Acts includes: The Wish Collector by Oladipo Agboluaje, The Acme Thunderer by Lin Coghlan, and Of the Terrifying Events on the Hamelin Estate by Philip Osment.

A modern re-imagining of Hans Christian Anderson's tale, The Ugly Duckling.

Osment has written and directed plays for two of the country's most prominent young people's theatres

Osment has written and directed plays for two of the country's most prominent young people's theatres

Philip Osment's magical play is funny, tender and true. Gabriel has to earn his stripes as a guardian angel to a poor orphaned girl as she grows up with her adoptive parents. Along the way he learns things about his own history and the real reason for his growing friendship with the little girl. Astonishing theatrical skills, including puppetry, live music and song combine to create this wondrous adventure, an unforgettable exploration of the joys and heartaches of living and loving. A family show for audiences of 6+, Little Violet and the Angel won the Peggy Ramsay Award and toured in the spring of 2001.

Stewart is an award-winning photo-journalist who specialises in recording atrocities around the world. A young woman, a journalist herself, who is an admirer of his work, starts to investigate Stewart's life and in doing so uncovers a disturbing family history. Set in Edinburgh, the play moves between the present day and the late 1970s of Stewart's childhood. Gradually, the story of Stewart and his two sisters and the nightmare imposed on them by their deranged mother and ineffectual father reveals itself. The play works as a psychological thriller and is about coming to terms with the past and the need for redemption and forgiveness.

Osment's trilogy of 'Devon Plays' draw on his background growing up on a farm in North Devon and were produced in the mid-1990s by Cambridge Theatre Company (Method and Madness). The Dearly Beloved (1993): 'Local boy made good comes back to visit his mother in a small West Country town where his presence brings home to his friends who stayed put the various ways in which their lives have failed ...you can't but be reminded of Chekhov at times.' Independent What I Did in the Holidays (1995): 'Osment's wonderfully dense and detailed study of fraught life in rurally non-swinging Britain. The play charts a painfully funny path through the casual everyday cruelties inflicted by the thoughtless young and selfish old. Osment's play is a delight.' Evening Standard Flesh and Blood (1996): 'Brilliant at evoking the nostalgia of Devon country life in a strange, recidivist family ...and in the elision between outdoor lust and indoor stuffiness.' Observer

A touching and sometimes comic story of five friends' journey into the Irish countryside to scatter the ashes of a friend who died of AIDS.

"A dramatist of exceptional and distinctive promise" (Daily Telegraph) The early 1950s. Two brothers and a sister are marooned on a remote farm after their father's death. They are thrown into a state of panic when one of them makes a bid for freedom. Long-suppressed jealousies and resentments begin to seethe and fester. Thirty years later an unexpected visitor brings their feud to a climax.Flesh and Blood completes Philip Osment's trilogy of Devon plays, following the highly acclaimed The Dearly Beloved (winner, 1993 Writers Guild Award) and What I Did in the Holidays (nominee 1995 Writers Guild Award).

When a successful London television producer returns to his rural hometown, his arrival heralds suffering and domestic turmoil in this sensitive and compelling depiction of varying family relationships.-4 men