S4 Ep3: Stef Smith talks to Simon Stephens

The debt that recent years of black British playwrights owes to Winsome Pinnock has been celebrated and is unarguable. While upholding and championing her cultural presence as a figure of enormous importance in the recent dramatising of Black experience in the country, she has dramatised the existential catastrophes brought about by capital and gender inequality as much as by the innate racism of the legacy of British colonialism.

A prolific and successful television and radio writer, David Eldridge has defined himself as a dramatist with force and clarity, humanity and capacity for contradiction with which he has built a dramatic version of London’s East End.

Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's 2004 production of Bezhiti (Dishnour) led to threats of violence against her and her family. It also has distracted many people from the fierce energy, honesty and clarity of her plays. Kaur Bhatti made her Royal Court debut in 2014 with the beautiful Khandan (Family).

Eve Leigh is a writer of range and conviction. Her theatre is built on an understanding of the importance of the presence of the audience in her work. She invents games for them to play. She imagines magic tricks for them to take part in. She makes music for them to listen to. In recent years her commitment to the investigation of issues of ability and access in the theatre have been integrated into her work in a way that is as theatrical and playful as it is serious and nuanced.

Khawla Ibraheem is a playwright, actor and director based in the Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights. She is a regular at many theatres in Palestine and outside of Palestine she has collaborated with many theatres and institutions, including as a fellow at the McDowell, and as an artist in residence at the Sundance Theatre Lab. Khawla's one-woman play, A Knock on the Roof, opens at the Royal Court later this month.

Amir Gudarzi is a writer born in Tehran, Iran, in 1986. Due to censorship his plays were only shown in private circles. And since 2009, Amir has lived in involuntary exile in Vienna, Austria.

Zinnie Harris has been a presence in the new writing scenes of her home country of Scotland and in London alike. In that time, no writer has drawn so fully and with such imagination from the classical cannon of dramatic literature. Harris's plays are creatures steeped in their dramatic past. Classical heritage sits in her own original work as freshly as in those adaptations.

Sabrina Ali is a British Somali writer and actor, who is driven by a passion for sharing authentic and representative stories. Sabrina’s most recent play, Dugsi Dayz, played at Edinburgh Fringe 2023, returned to the New Diorama last year and will play in the Royal Court’s Jerwood Theatre Upstairs this Spring.

Over the last decade, Stef Smith has become one of the UK’s most urgent theatre makers. She is restless, not just in the face of her world’s deep grained political and economic injustices of the highest order but also in the capacity for conventional theatre forms to properly explore those injustices. It is this restlessness that has driven and defined one of the most compelling theatrical biographies of the decade.

Tife Kusoro is a writer and performer whose work has previously been shortlisted for the Alfred Fagon award, Verity Bargate award and the Women’s Prize for Playwriting. Tife’s play G was developed whilst on attachment with the Royal Court, it will debut in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs later this year.