Olivier Award winner Simon Stephens is one of Britain’s best-loved playwrights. The author of more than twenty stage plays, including Punk Rock, Port, Three Kingdoms and Pornography, as well as the celebrated adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, he is a former tutor on the Royal Court Young Writers Programme. Awards include the Pearson Award for Best New Play, 2001, for Port; Olivier Award for Best New Play for On the Shore of the Wide World, 2005; Best Foreign Playwright, as voted by German critics in Theater Heute's annual poll, 2007; the Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland for Best New Play, 2008 for Pornography; and the Olivier Award for Best New Play, 2013, for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. His adaptation of Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Play.

Simon Stephens is clearly trying something new. Instead of a play with fixed characters, he offers a text he describes as “fluid and contradictory and tentative and inchoate” that offers maximum freedom to the director, Imogen Knight, and the five performers … a woman traumatised by personal loss and desperately seeking human contact as she journeys through a city [ … ] travels on buses and tubes, sits in coffee bars, marvels at the beauty of the women she sees – “They come from all over the world to be be here” – but all the time she is shadowed by the memory of a lost lover and by her own inviolable solitude.

• Introduction by Simon StephensNuclear WarLyrics for collaboration with Wende Snijders