Why Can't We Live Together? (NHB Modern Plays)

Set against the low hum of the War on Terror, Why Can't We Live Together? is a kaleidoscopic vision of our times through the lives of one man and one woman. This play is taken from Steve Waters: Shorts, five short plays from acclaimed playwright Steve Waters, all of them deeply personal accounts of his attempts to make sense of twenty-first-century Britain and an ever-changing world.

Steve Waters' plays include Limehouse (Donmar Warehouse; Temple (Donmar Warehouse); Why Can't We Live Together? (Menagerie Theatre/Soho/Theatre503); Europa, as co-author (Birmingham Repertory Theatre/Dresden State Theatre/Teatr Polski Bydgoszcz/Zagreb Youth Theatre); Ignorance/Jahiliyyah (Hampstead Downstairs); Little Platoons, The Contingency Plan, Capernaum (part of Sixty-Six Books; Bush, London); Fast Labour (Hampstead, in association with West Yorkshire Playhouse); Out of Your Knowledge (Menagerie Theatre/Pleasance, Edinburgh/East Anglian tour); World Music (Sheffield Crucible, and subsequent transfer to the Donmar Warehouse); The Unthinkable (Sheffield Crucible); English Journeys, After the Gods (Hampstead); a translation/adaptation of a new play by Philippe Minyana, Habitats (Gate, London/ Tron, Glasgow); Flight Without End (LAMDA). Writing for television and radio includes Safe House (BBC4), The Air Gap, The Moderniser (BBC Radio 4), Scribblers and Bretton Woods (BBC Radio 3). Steve ran the Birmingham MPhil in Playwriting between 2006 and 2011 and now runs the MA Creative Writing: Script at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of The Secret Life of Plays, also published by Nick Hern Books.