Albion (NHB Modern Plays)

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. '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 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

Mike Barlett is an award-winning playwright whose plays include Wild (Hampstead Theatre); Game (Almeida Theatre); King Charles III (Almeida/West End/Broadway); 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 three-part television series, The Town, was broadcast on ITV1 in 2012 and nominated for a BAFTA for Breakthrough Talent, and his five-part series Doctor Foster premiered on BBC1 in 2015 and won Best New Drama at the National Television Awards.