Mud (NHB Modern Plays)

'Stagnant. It's stagnant. Seen more life in a dead rabbit.' A group of lonely people converge on the North Yorkshire moors. George, recently retired and grieving for his wife, has come on holiday to fish. Harold, son of the local squire, has come to shoot. Alan and Pauline have come to escape prying eyes. Hopes, dreams and fears play out in a Beckettian landscape as RAF fighter planes tear across the sky. Robert Holman's play Mud was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in August 1974 under the title Taking Stock.

Robert Holman is a renowned and celebrated playwright in British Theatre. His plays include: Mud (Royal Court Theatre, 1974); German Skerries (Bush Theatre, 1977, and revived at the Orange Tree Theatre, 2016); Rooting (Traverse Theatre, 1979); Other Worlds (Royal Court Theatre, 1980); Today (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1984); The Overgrown Path (Royal Court Theatre, 1985); Making Noise Quietly (Bush Theatre, 1987, and revived at the Donmar Warehouse, 2012); Across Oka (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1988); Rafts and Dreams (Royal Court Theatre, 1990); Bad Weather (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1998); Holes in the Skin (Chichester Festival Theatre, 2003); Jonah and Otto (Royal Exchange Theatre, 2008, and revived at the Park Theatre, 2014); A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky, co-written with David Eldridge and Simon Stephens (Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, 2010); and A Breakfast of Eels (Print Room at the Coronet, 2015). He has also written a novel, The Amish Landscape.