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A premiere by Mark Ravenhill has been an event ever since the British playwright’s explosive debut 30 years ago with Shopping and Fucking. But Ravenhill is now set to unveil a staggering 10 new full-length plays over two days, performed by a cast of 80 actors and directed by Ravenhill.
An epic cycle of bawdy modern comedies, the plays borrow from scenarios collected in a 1611 publication by the Italian commedia dell’arte actor and manager Flaminio Scala. Ravenhill said he had been attracted to the “generosity of spirit and comic energy” of the scenarios. “They are sexually frank, with the women given as much agency as the men. They are socially acute, depicting the newly rich mixing with the urban poor and new migrants from the countryside. They are grounded in money, sex and the body.” Collectively, the storylines depict a world “in which we are all fools and we all need to find a way to get along”. His aim, Ravenhill said, was not to make a historical reconstruction but “to write plays that allow contemporary audiences to laugh and to celebrate our shared humanity”.
The 90-minute plays were written over the past year – roughly one a month – as Ravenhill collaborated with actors in workshops run by the organisation Run at It Shouting (named after the advice Paul McGann’s character is given when faced with a “randy” bull in the film Withnail and I). Ravenhill’s cycle of plays has been given the collective title Run at It Laughing. The series of rehearsed readings will take place at Wilton’s Music Hall in east London, starting at noon on 9 May and finishing the next evening.
Tickets for individual plays will be available and audiences with enough stamina can book for the full sequence. “Each of the plays puts the same characters in different situations,” said Ravenhill. “There’s a cumulative pleasure in seeing several … As you get to know the characters, there’s an extra level of comedy and recognition. Much as there is with contemporary sitcom.” Tickets for the first play are £12, with subsequent plays priced at £8. A “weekend pass” costs £40.
Actors from the workshops will take part in the rehearsed readings. “There were no written scenes or dialogues in [Scala’s] volume,” Ravenhill explained. “Simply a four-page outline for each of the plays. The plays had been improvised, using the scenarios, in the 1570s and 1580s by an Italian troupe [Compagnia dei Gelosi, which translates as “Company of Jealous Ones”]. These were the first fully professional actors in Europe and the first to include women as equal members of the company. One of these female actors, Isabella Andreini, became the most famous performer of her day.” Andreini was also a notable poet and playwright.
The scenarios’ influence can be seen in works by Shakespeare, Lope de Vega and Molière, said Ravenhill. “But, being improvised, the influence of these plays has mostly been forgotten.”
Profits from the event will be donated to the Nia Project, which runs services for women and girls who have been subjected to sexual and domestic violence and abuse.
Ravenhill’s recent plays include a ghost story, The Haunting of Susan A, which ran at the King’s Head theatre in north London when he was joint artistic director from 2021-23. During that time the theatre celebrated its 50th anniversary and moved from the back room of a London pub to a bigger, purpose-built home.
In 2024, the Royal Shakespeare Company staged Ravenhill’s play Ben and Imo, which was originally written for the centenary of Benjamin Britten’s birth and performed on BBC Radio 3 in 2013. The play charts the relationship between the composer and the musician Imogen Holst as they work together on an opera to celebrate the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. Erica Whyman’s production, starring Samuel Barnett and Victoria Yeates, transfers to the Orange Tree theatre in London next month.
