Simon Stephens is an award-winning playwright.
His early work at the Royal Court includes Bluebird (1998); Herons (2001), Country Music (2004) and Motortown (2006). In 2008 his play Harper Regan opened at the National Theatre, and Sea Wall played at the Bush Theatre, London. Simon then had success with his plays Pornography (Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hanover, 2007 and Edinburgh Festival / Birmingham Rep, 2008 and Tricycle Theatre, 2009) and Punk Rock (Lyric Hammersmith / Manchester Royal Exchange, 2009) which won the 2009 Manchester Evening News award for Best Production.
In 2011, I Am the Wind, an adaptation from Jon Fosse’s original, opened at the Young Vic. 2012 saw Three Kingdoms performed in London, Tallinn and Munich, Morning at the Lyric Theatre, and a new version of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at the Young Vic which subsequently transferred to the Duke of York’s Theatre in 2013. His adaption of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time won the Olivier award for Best New Play (National Theatre, 2012; Apollo Theatre, 2013; Gielgud, 2014 – June 2017; Barrymore Theatre in Broadway, 2015). In 2014 Simon Stephens premiered Carmen Disruption at Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, and Almeida Theatre, London (2015), and Birdland at the Royal Court. His adaptation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard opened at the Young Vic in 2014.
Song from Far Away, directed by Ivo van Hove, received its UK premiere at the Young Vic in September 2015. Also in 2015, Heisenberg opened at MTC in New York, and The Funfair, Simon’s version of Ödön von Horváth’s Kasimir and Karoline, opened at Home in Manchester. Simon also writes for radio: plays include Five Letters Home to Elizabeth (2001) and Digging (2003), both for BBC Radio 4. Simon’s screenwriting includes a two-part serial Dive for Granada/BBC (2009), a short film adaptation of Pornography for Coming Up: Channel 4 (2009) and Cargese for Sprout Pictures (Sky Arts, 2013).
Other awards include the 2001 Pearson award for Best Play for Port and the 2005 Olivier award for Best New Play for On the Shore of the Wide World. Simon won the Theater Heute award for Motortown in 2007, Pornography in 2008 and Wastwater in 2011. Simon is Artistic Associate at the Lyric Theatre and Associate Playwright at the Royal Court. He was on the board of Paines Plough between 2009 and 2014 and was a Writers’ Tutor for the Young Writers’ Programme at the Royal Court between 2001 and 2005.