'It's England really, isn't it?
A climate without cloud and rain isn't honest.'
In the ruins of a garden in rural England, in a house which was once a home, one woman searches for seeds of hope.
Mike Bartlett's play Albion was premiered in October 2017 at the Almeida Theatre, London, in a production directed by Rupert Goold. It was revived at the Almeida in February 2020.
Mike Barlett is an award-winning playwright whose plays include: Scandaltown (Lyric Hammersmith, 2022); The 47th (Old Vic, London, 2022); Mrs Delgado (Old Fire Station, Oxford, 2021); Vassa, adapted from Maxim Gorky's play Vassa Zheleznova (Almeida Theatre, London, 2019); Snowflake (Old Fire Station, Oxford, 2018; revived at Kiln Theatre, London, 2019); Albion (Almeida Theatre, 2017); Wild (Hampstead Theatre, 2016); Game (Almeida Theatre, 2015); King Charles III (Almeida/West End/Broadway, 2014-15); An Intervention (Paines Plough/Watford Palace Theatre); Bull (Sheffield Theatres/Off-Broadway); Medea (Glasgow Citizens/Headlong); Chariots of Fire (based on the film; Hampstead/West End); 13 (National Theatre); Love, Love, Love (Paines Plough/Plymouth Drum/Royal Court); Earthquakes in London (Headlong/National Theatre); Cock (Royal Court/Off-Broadway); Artefacts (Nabokov/Bush); Contractions and My Child (Royal Court). He was Writer-in-Residence at the National Theatre in 2011, and the Pearson Playwright-in-Residence at the Royal Court Theatre in 2007. Cock won an Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre in 2010. Love, Love, Love won the TMA Best New Play Award in 2011. Bull won the same award in 2013. King Charles III won the Critics' Circle Award for Best New Play in 2015. He has written several plays for BBC Radio, winning the Writers' Guild Tinniswood and Imison prizes for Not Talking. His work for television includes Press (BBC One, 2018); Trauma (ITV, 2018); two series of Doctor Foster (BBC One, 2015 & 2017, Best New Drama at the National Television Awards); and The Town (ITV1, 2012).
Title: Albion (NHB Modern Plays)
Author: Mike Bartlett
ISBN: 9781848427150
Binding:
Publisher: Nick Hern Books
Publication Date: 2017-10-12
Number of Pages: 128
Weight: 0.1996 kg
'Something remarkable. Our country needs it'
* Telegraph *
'[Has] a deeply reflective and humane quality to it: Bartlett draws his confused characters with a Chekhovian mix of wit and compassion... explores national identity through private mourning, and the meaning of the garden shifts, grows and deepens with the seasons'
* Financial Times *
'Scintillating... in the sometimes abrasive but always compelling Audrey, Bartlett has written a richly imagined female lead who can be mentioned in the same breath as the self-dramatizing Arkadina in The Seagull'
* New York Times *
'A tragicomic paean to England and its discontents, novelistic in scale, combining the acute social observation of traditional British country-house drama with self-consciously Chekhovian grace notes. Downton Abbey meets The Cherry Orchard... a pastoral elegy with grand state-of-the-nation ambitions, [which] delves deep into conflicted notions of patriotism and nostalgia in post-Brexit Britain'
* Hollywood Reporter *
'A work of deeply absorbing emotional richness and symphonic density'
* Independent *
'Fascinating, complex... what makes the play so enormously intriguing is that, as in his King Charles III, Bartlett shows us as a deeply divided people torn between the urge to preserve the past and to radically reform it'
* Guardian *
'Outstanding, thrillingly ambitious theatre'
* Broadway World *
'A meditation on family and friends, false hopes and busted dreams'
* The Times *
'Bartlett pays homage to Chekhov, matching his sense of domesticity's mixture of stultifying banality and desperate strangeness - while also calling to mind the wistful cleverness of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia... shot through with shrewdly observed humour, and there are moments of vivid poignancy'
* Evening Standard *
'Smartly distils troubled England down to an elegiac microcosm... a thoughtful, layered interrogation'
* Time Out *
'An intensely felt, delicately observed drama spanning a century of social change, that coaxes into blood-red bloom affecting ideas about home, identity, and love... a hybrid of earthy sensuality, sentimental nostalgia and damaging emotional frigidity that is peculiarly English. It's a domestic drama painfully ripped up by its roots, a depiction of modern England's dreaming full of hopeless longing, fear and despair... while the setting appears genteel, the drama goes for the gut. It's gloriously rich, achingly sad, and quite beautiful'
* The Stage *
'There's something of a Greek tragedy in the primal forces that are unleashed... Bartlett reveals an ability to create a surging family saga, full of big emotions and high feelings... he keeps the tone funny, even as the mood turns dark, which is a rare skill'
* WhatsOnStage *
'A tragic comedy which is bright with insights and one-liners... Albion is breathtaking in its ambition and at its best achieves a neat balance between believable family drama and a more metaphoric state-of-the-nation resonance. It's enjoyable, humane and highly symbolic'
* The Arts Desk *
