The Theatre of Laura Wade

Henry Bell, Sophie Bush, Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., Patrick Lonergan

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN: 9781350282117
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria en el arte dramático

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of figure and tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Routes into writing: The unpublished plays of Laura Wade
• 2 An arrival in form: Time, space and dialogue in Colder Than Here, Breathing Corpses and Other Hands
• 3 The women in the room: On-stage and off-stage gender dynamics in Posh and The Riot Club
• 4 Long road home: Collaborations in Home, I’m Darling
• 5 Radical kindness: Re-centring female experience in Laura Wade’s approach to stage adaptation: The Watsons, Tipping the Velvet, ‘KREUTZER VS. KREUTZER’ and Alice
• 6 Teaching and staging the theatre of Laura Wade
• Conclusions
• Chronology
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright