Eldridge Plays: 2

This second collection of plays by David Eldridge showcases the development of one of the most impressive playwriting talents of recent years. His plays combine emotional impact with complexity, realistic characterisation with humour, and are among the most powerfully moving dramas of contemporary playwriting.

Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness moves between a dream story and real lives to tell an intricate, complex story of a young man dealing with the break up of his family and the legacy of race responsibility.

Market Boy is a gloriously raucous rites-of-passage drama set in Romford Market in the 1980s. Bringing a market jungle to life with the decade's Thatcherite capitalist fervour, this spectacular, savage, and beautiful yarn is a tale looks at a boy's coming of age and loss of innocence.

The Knot of the Heart has themes of love, family and addiction, and explores the creeping onset of self-destruction beneath a veneer of respectability. Full of David Eldridge's trademark lyricism within everyday family life and interaction, this is a play where emotions are high and relationships are sensitively written.

The Stock Da'wa explodes the wafer thin bonhomie of a long-awaited reunion into a blackly funny maelstrom of pique and long repressed truth-telling - and with shocking consequences.

Eldridge Plays 2 contains the definitive version of the four plays and an introduction by the author.

Autorentext

David Eldridge's theatre credits include: Market Boy (Olivier Theatre, National Theatre); Holy Warriors (Shakespeare's Globe); Miss Julie, The Lady from the Sea (Royal Exchange, Manchester); In Basildon, Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness, Under the Blue Sky (Royal Court & West End); Something, Someone, Somewhere (Sixty-Six Books/Bush Theatre); MAD, Serving it Up (Bush); The Knot of the Heart (Almeida), Festen (Almeida, Lyric West End & Broadway); The Stock Da'wa, Falling (Hampstead); A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky (with Robert Holman & Simon Stephens, Lyric Hammersmith); Babylone (Belgrade Coventry); John Gabriel Borkman, The Wild Duck, Summer Begins (Donmar Warehouse); A Week With Tony, Fighting for Breath (Finborough); Thanks Mum (Red Room); Dirty (Theatre Royal Stratford East); Cabbage for, Tea, Tea, Tea! (Platform 4 Exeter).
Television credits include: Killers, Our Hidden Lives, The Scandalous Lady W (BBC).
Radio credits include: Michael and Me: Stratford, Ilford, Romford and all Stations to Shenfield; Festen; The Picture Man; Like Minded People; The Secret Grief; John Gabriel Borkman; Jenny Lomas (BBC).
Under the Blue Sky won the Time Out Live Award 2001 for Best New Play in the West End and Festen the 2005 Theatregoers Choice Award for Best New Play. The Picture Man won the Prix Europa Best European Radio Drama 2008. Under the Blue Sky won the 2009 Theatregoers Choice Award for Best New Play. The Knot of the Heart won the 2012 Off West End Theatre Award for Best New Play.
In 2007 the University of Exeter conferred on David an Honorary Doctorate of Letters recognising his achievement as a playwright. He is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London.