Simon Stephens: 40 books

The funny thing is the harder I work the more clearly I understand things. When I'm worn out after a day's work then it's like my brain relaxes. And sometimes then I get it. The meaning of my life. My purpose on this earth. How many people ever get to say that? And you know what? It doesn't matter....

Pornography looks at the events of the first week of July 2005 (the G8 summit, Live 8, the announcement of the 2012 Olympics and the 7/7 bombings) through the perspectives of eight anonymous individuals, including a terrorist. The play can be performed by any number of actors with the scenes presented...

I kept telling myself I wanted something more out of my life, something brighter. I had all these ideas in my head. Thing is, I had to go down so low just to try to lift my life up a little bit higher. Simon Stephens's exciting new adaptation of the twentieth-century classic Kasimir and Karoline...

Fatherland is a bold, ambitious show about contemporary fatherhood in all its complexities and contradictions. Created by Frantic Assembly's Scott Graham, Karl Hyde from Underworld and playwright Simon Stephens (Punk Rock, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), this daring collage of...

Simon Stephens' explosive play Rage was written as a counterpoint for Elfriede Jelinek's Wut. Composed as31 high-energy scenes, each one is based on a series of photos by Joel Goodman which captured the excitement and the mayhem of New Year's Eve 2015/16 in Manchester city centre. Published in the...

Seasonal new play by London's most prolific and evocative playwright People don't mourn out of love, they mourn out of fear and the fear makes them stop. Michael, Billy and Giuseppe are biding their time before Christmas away from their loved ones. When Charlie comes in with his cello,...

Four plays inspired by and originating on the European stage from one of Britain's most important playwrights. Three Kingdoms was presented at Teater NO99 in Tallinn, Estonia on 17 September 2011, before opening at the Munich Kammerspiele, Germany, on 15 October 2011. 'An inconsolable mood...

I drank three glasses of scotch and ginger ale before we'd even cleared Coney Island. I didn't want to come home. It was then that I decided to write you these letters. On a crisp winter day in New York, Willem gets the call. It's Mum. Pauli's died. Come back to Amsterdam. An unforgettable...

'Everything human beings do finishes up bad in the end. Everything good human beings ever make is built on something monstrous. Nothing lasts. We certainly won't...' Based on his experience as a teacher, Stephens describes his play as 'The History Boys on crack'. It explores the underlying...

Danny returns from Basra to a foreign England and a different kind of battle. He visits an old flame, buys a gun and goes on a blistering road trip through the new home front. 'I don't blame the war. The war was alright. I miss it. It's just you come back to this.' Written during the London bombings...

Everything human beings do finishes up bad in the end. Everything good human beings ever make is built on something monstrous. Nothing lasts. We certainly won't . . . William Carlisle has the world at his feet, but its weight on his shoulders. He is intelligent, articulate and f***ed. In the...

From about the middle of the seventeenth century the Navy’s administrators began to commission models of their ships that were accurately detailed and, for the first time, systematically to scale. These developed a recognised style, which included features like the unplanked lower hull with a simplified...

On a farm in the North East of England a family gathers. Five brothers and four generations feature in an epic play about hope, love, fear and the very end of time. A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky is a refreshingly subtle and compassionate vision of the world on the edge of apocalypse....

If you go, I don't think you should come back. On a startlingly bright autumn night in 2006, Harper Regan walked away from her home, her husband and daughter, and kept walking. She told nobody that she was going. She told nobody where she was going. She put everything she ever built at risk....