Borders are shut. The country is underpopulated. Citizens are required to have children.

Nia, a prominent journalist, has always sat on the fence about these regulations despite it impacting her and her husband’s lives. As she seeks to escape from the country and tell the story of what’s happening in a now isolated nation, she is forced to interrogate the cost of what she’s leaving behind.

What does it mean to have a significant part of your life forced upon you?

A dystopian drama that explores love, parenthood, and free will.

Part of the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama’s annual NEW Festival.

Set in an unnamed city from which voices and images spring, Crave is a meditation on the nature of craving, and more specifically, the nature of loss.

The play in its earliest form was written under a pseudonym Marie Kelvedon, as part of Paines Plough’s first ‘Wild Lunch’ season of script-in-hand performances at the Bridewell Theatre in 1997.

This anonymity enabled Sarah to make a radical departure in the form, content and style of her writing, and to gauge the response of an audience unburdened by preconceptions based on the extreme reactions to her past work, including Blasted in 1995.

Crave marked a departure in Sarah’s work. Having pioneered a new theatre where brutality and action express an emotional narrative, in Crave she deployed language like music. Rhythm and orchestration were as vital as content to understand and respond to the play.

The result was dark, compassionate and exhilarating, and was commissioned immediately by Paines Plough.

A bumper celebration of new writing and writers, to celebrate Paines Plough’s 50th birthday and raise funds to secure our future.

The evening featured an exclusive new piece entitled ‘The Next 50’, written by our patron James Graham and performed by Monica Dolan.

Followed by extracts from some of Paines Plough’s seminal productions, performed by guest stars:

• Crave by Sarah Kane – featuring Thomas Coombes, Alfred Enoch, Siobhan McSweeney and Rebekah Murrell directed by the play’s original director Vicky Featherstone.
• After the End by Dennis Kelly – performed by TV royalty, Meg Bellamy (Princess Kate in The Crown) and Hugh Skinner (Prince William in The Windsors), directed by Matthew Dunster.
• Love, Love, Love by Mike Bartlett – performed by Lesley Sharp, Iain Glen and Jessie Cave, directed by Charlotte Bennett.
• Sea Wall by Simon Stephens – performed by Tom Sturridge (The Sandman), who received a Tony nomination for his performance in the Broadway production of Sea Wall in 2019, directed by Charlotte Bennett.
• Hungry by Chris Bush – featuring Heather Agyepong (Shifters; The Power) and Sophie Melville (Cowbois; The Way), directed by Katie Posner.
• A filmed segment with Olivier Award-winner Amy Trigg, who will record a scene from Reasons You Should(n’t) Love Me (winner of the Women’s Prize for Playwriting in 2021), in the venue where it all began for us as a company 50 years ago: the Plough pub in Bolnhurst, Bedford.
• Bullring Techno Makeout Jamz by Nathan Queeley-Dennis – performed by Kola Bokinni (Ted Lasso), directed by Katie Posner.
• Every Brilliant Thing by Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe.

Appearances will also include Indhu Rubasingham (Director Designate of the National Theatre), and playwrights James Graham, Roy Williams, Mark Ravenhill and Ryan Calais Cameron.

This event is part of Paines Plough’s 50 for 50 Campaign which aims to raise £50,000 to support its work at at time when new writing is under threat. There are so many stories in danger of never being heard, and we want to make sure we can spend the next 50 years finding them.

The true story of a cultural martyr and a cultural oppressor.

When two penniless actresses meet in Shanghai at auditions for Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, they quickly become inseparable. But as political upheaval rips through China, their tumultuous friendship will alter not only the course of their lives, but the course of history. One will become China’s first female director. The other, the architect of the Cultural Revolution.

Amy Ng’s newest play looks at the untold story of two of the most influential women in Chinese history – Madame Mao and Sun Weishi – and how the personal truly is political.