Robert Holman

In the haze of a late summer in a London garden, the apples have all fallen to the ground. It is the day of Daddy's funeral, and two orphans find themselves suddenly alone, with nobody to cling to but each other... Robert Holman's new play is premiered by Print Room at the Coronet, London, from March 2015.

A Breakfast of Eels

Fifteen-year-old Kerry and her mum have moved to a council estate. Kerry hates it. She hates her mum's new man too. But when she meets a boy in the playground and asks him to do something about it, she finds herself adrift in a landscape of physical brutality, drugs - and, eventually, love. Premiered at the Chichester Festival's Minerva Theatre, Robert Holman's gripping new play explores the nature of violence and the possibility of redemption.

Holes in the Skin

Robert Holman's Jonah and Otto is a humane, funny and ultimately haunting play that explores masculinity, identity and what it means to be English. Over the course of a single day, two men share their solitude and unfold their secrets. They disagree with each other about women, about lust and about guilt. They question the power of magic, of redemption and the price of freedom, each seeing himself more clearly through the eyes of the other. Jonah and Otto premiered in 2008 at the Royal Exchange, Manchester. This edition was published alongside its London premiere at the Park Theatre in 2014.

Jonah and Otto

Robert Holman's play The Natural Cause is a dark and disturbing portrait of mental illness, and its effects on a young family. It was first performed at the Cockpit Theatre, London, on 27 May 1974. Although written after his earlier play Mud, The Natural Cause was Holman's first full-length play to be staged. A stage direction at the start of the play states that 'The play is an autopsy. It should take place in a mortuary on a white tiled floor.' The dead body of Barry Jackson is wheeled in and a pathologist begins his examination as Lyn Jackson, Barry's mother, recalls what Barry was like as a child. The action proceeds in flashback, with Barry and his pregnant wife Mary on Brighton beach. Barry is a bus conductor, but he'd like to drive the bus one day instead. Lyn keeps telling Mary that Barry's not right, and that she should leave him. But Mary chooses to stick with Barry, as his mental deterioration has frightening consequences. The premiere production was directed by Ron Daniels, and was performed by Natasha Pyne, Nicholas Ball, George Sweeney, Derek Thompson, Maureen Sweeney and Peter Maycock.

The Natural Cause

Robert Holman's play Other Worlds is a historical drama set in an eighteenth-century fishing community on the isolated North Yorkshire coast, during the time of a threatened invasion by France. It was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, on 6 May 1983. The play is set near the village of Fylingthorpe and the small town of Robin Hood's Bay on the North Yorkshire coast, in July 1797, and (in Act Two) twenty years earlier. When a boat is wrecked off the coast during a ferocious storm, the locals fear that it signals the start of a long-expected French invasion - and a gorilla found wandering on the beach is taken for a French spy. Simmering beneath the unrest and paranoia is a decades-old feud between the local fishing and farming communities, fuelled by suspicion and class rivalry, and a deep-rooted fear of the unknown. The premiere production was directed by Richard Wilson, and performed by Paul Copley, Paul Luty, Anita Carey, John Holmes, Rosemary Leach, Juliet Stevenson, Jim Broadbent, Lesley Dunlop and Peter O'Farrell.

Other Worlds

"Robert Holman is the quiet man among modern British dramatists. But his new play...is an outstanding work that sings with truth" (Michael Billington, Guardian) Eileen and her grandson Matty, 16, travel to Russia to stay with scientist Pavel and his son Nikolai, 14, on the Oka reserve where they are to take part in an experiment to save the Siberian Crane from extinction. When the two boys, Matty and Nikolai are given the responsibility of travelling into the wilds, the clash of their personalities, education and experience provokes in Matty an appalling destructiveness. Across Oka was premiered at The Other Place (RSC) in 1988. "Robert Holman's Across Oka is about metamorphosis and manipulation in the lives of passionate, gentle people in north Yorkshire and eastern Russia, the first opent to all experience, the second constrained by the discipline of an enclosing state...The new play is alive with theatrical confrontation and generosity of spirit." (Michael Ratcliffe, Observer)

Across Oka

The Overgrown Path

A collection of five plays by Robert Holman.

Robert Holman Plays: One

Robert Holman's play Mud is his earliest full-length play (although it was first staged shortly after the play he wrote subsequently, The Natural Cause). Mud was first performed under the title Taking Stock at the Royal Court Theatre, London, on 25 August 1974. The play is set on the North Yorkshire moors near Whitby, over the course of one very hot August. A group of lonely people converge on a 'rough and barren' patch of moorland. George Hardcastle, recently retired and grieving for his wife, has come on holiday to fish. Harold Pike, son of the local squire, has come to shoot. Alan Todd and Pauline Swailes have come to escape prying eyes. Hopes, dreams and fears play out as RAF fighter planes tear across the sky. The premiere production was directed by Chris Parr, and it was performed by John Normington, Ian Marter, Brian Deacon, Susie Blake and Gerald James.

A play about freedom, guilt and the possibility of redemption, premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Following a fight at a restaurant in Middlesbrough in which a man is badly injured, one man is sent to prison. The other man involved goes free, yet it is a freedom full of burden. Out of the blue, a figure from the family past arrives and another kind of escape is on offer.

Bad Weather

An acclaimed trilogy of plays exploring the impact of war on ordinary lives. In Being Friends, two young men meet in a Kentish field in 1944 as V2s whizz overhead. One is a conscientious objector, the other an artist, but an intense bond forms between them. In Lost, May Appleton, whose son is serving in the Falklands, receives the visit that every mother dreads. In Making Noise Quietly, set in 1986 in the Black Forest, a German businesswoman takes into her home a fugitive British private and his disturbed stepson.

Three Short Plays

Making Noise Quietly

"Robert Holman is the quiet man among modern British dramatists. But his new play...is an outstanding work that sings with truth" (Michael Billington, Guardian) Rafts and Dreams: "While digging up the roots of a tree in the garden, Neil, Leo and Hetty uncover a vast underground lake which floods away the world. With Leo at the tiller of his sawn-away living room, the trio begin a voyage of the earth's watery surface. It is a surrealist fantasy at its most thought-provoking, a play whose best bits manage to work like a dream" (Paul Taylor, Independent). Outside the Whale is a fictional account of the writer George Orwell set in the early 30s in which the action moves easily over a period of three years and settings as various as the basement warehouse of the publishers Victor Gollancz, a hen-hut in Essex and the dosshouse in Romford.

Rafts and Dreams & Outside the Whale

German Skerries, 3m 1f and Mud, 4m 1f

Two Plays

German Skerries and Mud

This publication follows the first major revival of an award-winning play by acclaimed dramatist Robert Holman.

German Skerries

Institut Václava Klause

a kol.

Stanislava Janáčková

Martin Pecina

Michaela Erbenová

Helena Horská

Eva Zamrazilová

Martin Kupka

Publikace obsahuje texty ze tří ekonomických seminářů, které Centrum pro ekonomiku a politiku uspořádalo ve druhé polovině roku 2005. Nejobsáhlejší jsou příspěvky ze semináře s názvem Přebytek obchodní bilance – zázrak nebo zákonitost?, dále jsou zde příspěvky ze seminářů Antimonopolní politika – klacek na úspěšné? a Strukturální fondy – zázračný zdroj nebo černá díra?.

Přebytek obchodní bilance: zázrak nebo zákonitost?

Sisters Dolly and Esther grow up in ultra-conservative Harrogate in the 1960s. Fifty years later, following the death of their mother, Dolly comes to stay with Esther - now a successful novelist and living in Little Venice with her younger, inscrutable lodger, Jude. The three go to Norway to meet the rock-star grandfather Jude has only ever heard about. Instead, he meets Anila who changes his world. To make a new future, these four people will have to be honest, heal old wounds - and two sisters learn to laugh together again. The Lodger by Robert Holman is an enlightening, cathartic and acerbic play about identity, maturity and reconciliation. It premiered at The Coronet Theatre, London, in September 2021.

The Lodger

Simon Stephens

David Eldridge

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. Within a cosmological context, the focus is on a single family, their relations with each other and their unreconciled regrets, soon to become permanent. With an ensemble of strong, engaging characters, there are knotty, realistic family dynamics and a palimpsest of recent family history. The characters and dialogue are naturalistic but the serious themes are elucidated and alleviated with humour and quirky, surreal touches. The play represents a unique collboration between three of the UK's pre-eminent stage writers. The ambition of the partnership is matched by the ambition of the play's sweeping scope. Whilst the three voices collide, they also ring out individually without sacrificing the piece's coherent wholeness, and the play represents a rare, fascinating study in stage collaboration.

A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky

Richard Ebeling

Jiří Havel

Milan Sojka

Vladimír Dlouhý

Dan Šťastný

Karel Kříž

Martin Říman

Publikace obsahuje texty ze dvou seminářů Centra pro ekonomiku a politiku konaných 20. února 2006 a 10. dubna 2006 s názvy Kapitalismus – ideál, nebo ošklivé slovo? a Co zbylo z Keyenese po šedesáti letech?. Dále přináší také několik inspirativních doplňkových textů.

Robert Holman

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