Current Playwright: Rebecca Lenkiewicz
A life in stages
Early life - Born 1968 in Plymouth, Devon. Read English and film studies at the University of Kent. Graduated from the Central School of Speech and Drama with a BA in acting.
Writing career
2000 Awarded a Fringe First at Edinburgh for her play Soho: A Tale of Table Dancers 2004 Wins the Critics' Circle award for most promising playwright with The Night Season. Nominated for an Evening Standard Award. 2005 Her play Shoreditch Madonna wins enthusiastic reviews. Finalist for the Susan Smith Backburn Prize (playwriting) for The Night Season. 2006 Creates a new version, set in Iraq, of The Soldier's Tale, a music theatre piece by Igor Stravinsky and Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, which is staged at the Old Vic. In August of the same year, her play Blue Moon Over Poplar is staged by the National Youth Theatre. April 2008 Her adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People opens at the Arcola Theatre, directed by its founder Mehmet Ergen.
Acting
She has worked with the Globe, National, Royal Shakespeare Company and on film and television. —Kate Kellaway
The Night Season is artistically ambitious. Literary influences abound. There are hints of Brian Friel, Marie Jones’s Stones in his Pocket, Conor McPherson and even Anton Chekhov. But to this galaxy of guiding stars Lenkiewicz adds a few other names she admires. “Shakespeare. Pinter. Tennessee Williams. The Brontë sisters. Colette. And Beckett,” she recalls. “He is my big hero.” Not in the least bit Polish herself, her surname derives from the late, self-styled bohemian Plymouth artist Robert Lenkiewicz, who married her mother. Her biological father is a writer by the name of Peter Quint who begot her at the tender age of 17.
The play’s Irishness she says comes from the voices that came to her as she conceived the piece. “I think the Irish have the licence to go further with the language where in English it would seem overdone. What interests me is how people relate to each other, how they express themselves and how limited we are in expressing ourselves. It’s quite hard to rehearse because it’s about what’s going on underneath the text. It’s up to the actors to find that and there’s not much help in the actual script. If someone asks what the character’s past is, I have a vague idea but it’s the actor’s job to decide.” — Paul Marmion, Times Online
