Robert Holman

'I can't undo what's been said. My world changed this morning. I hope for the better, but we'll see in the future.' 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.

Robert Holman wrote plays of startling beauty, combining close observation of the way people behave with a thrilling and often fiercely uncompromising mastery of dramatic form. He is the playwright most admired by other playwrights. To Simon Stephens, he was, until Holman's death in 2021, 'My favourite living writer'. Here, in this selection from Holman's first decade of playwriting, a monkey is taken for a French spy by an eighteenth-century fishing community; the inhabitants of a Greek island reside under the shadow of the atom bomb; and a group of lonely people converge on the North Yorkshire moors. With an introduction written for this volume by Holman himself, Robert Holman Plays: One contains The Natural Cause (Cockpit Theatre, London, 1974), Mud (Royal Court Theatre, London, 1974), Other Worlds (Royal Court, 1983), Today (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1984) and The Overgrown Path (Royal Court, 1985). 'Holman's instinct for truth, and an unaffected ability to spot what's poignant in it, is what one remembers: that, and a paradoxical impression of spare richness, astringent abundance' The Times

It's the hot, humid, sticky summer of 1977. At a popular birdwatching spot jutting out into the North Sea at the mouth of the Tees, Martin, Jack, Michael and Carol are staring out into the future, their lives intertwined. A friendship, a marriage, a holiday, and a death – the gatherings and departures that make us human. Robert Holman's richly resonant play is an uplifting portrait of human hope and vulnerability. German Skerries was first performed at the Bush Theatre, London, and won the George Devine Award in the year that it is set. It was revived in 2016 at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, in a co-production with the award-winning Up in Arms Theatre Company, followed by a tour around the UK.

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 play A Breakfast of Eels was premiered at the Print Room at the Coronet, London, in March 2015. It won Best New Play at The Offies (the annual awards for Off-West End theatre) in 2016.

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. Robert Holman's play 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.

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 doodlebugs 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. Robert Holman's trilogy of short plays, collectively called Making Noise Quietly, was first performed at the Bush Theatre, London, in June 1986. It was revived by the Oxford Stage Company at the Whitehall Theatre, London, in April 1999 following a UK tour. It received a major revival at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in April 2012.

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 gripping play about the nature of violence. 15-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. Robert Holman's play Holes in the Skin was first performed at the Chichester Festival Theatre in June 2003.

A play about freedom, guilt and the possibility of redemption. 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. Robert Holman's play Bad Weather was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, in April 1998, directed by Steven Pimlott.

"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)

"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.