Chris Bush Plays: One

Chris Bush is a highly acclaimed British playwright known for her thought-provoking and socially relevant plays. Her works explore themes of power, gender, identity, and northern culture, and have been performed extensively in the UK and Europe. Five of her plays, including "Steel," "The Stage Faustus: That Damned Woman," "Guardian Nine Lessons and Carols," "Hungry," and "Not the End of the World," are included in this collection, reflecting her unique style and perspective.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 320 pages
Publication date: 22 February 2024
Publisher: Nick Hern Books

Since her play "Steel" opened in her native Sheffield in 2018, Chris Bush has rapidly become one of the UK's most successful and widely staged playwrights, with her plays on stage at the National Theatre, in the West End, and across Europe. Celebrated for her spirited dissections of power, female agency, and northern identity, her work is infused with wit, empathy, and a powerful sense of place and belonging.

Included here are five of her plays, all first performed between 2018 and 2021, together with a revealing introduction in which she reflects on the tumultuous period from which they emerged.

Steel (Sheffield Theatres, 2018) is a political epic constructed from minimal resources, a two-hander spanning three decades of women in politics. Sharp, witty, and uncannily topical, The Stage Faustus: That Damned Woman (Headlong, 2020) is a radical reimagining of the classic tale, asking what women must sacrifice to achieve greatness. Original, ambitious, and fantastically revisionist, Guardian Nine Lessons and Carols (Almeida Theatre, 2020) is a play, with songs by Maimuna Memon, about connection and isolation, forged during the Covid pandemic, exploring what we hold on to in troubled times. A reminder of the power of theatre and our need for it, Telegraph Hungry (Paines Plough, 2021) is a pithy two-hander about food, love, class, and grief in a world where there's little left to savour. Reconfirms Chris Bush as one of our greatest, most relevant contemporary playwrights.

Broadway World Not the End of the World (Schaubühne, Berlin, 2021) is a daringly theatrical investigation of the climate crisis through the perspectives of class, patriarchy, and colonialism. Staggering... Bush's remarkable text melds a ruthless structural concept with exquisite lyricism.

Weight: 377g
Dimension: 198 x 129 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781839042973