Colder Than Here

Laura Wade is an Olivier-award winning playwright and screenwriter. Her plays include Posh; Home, I'm Darling (Olivier Award for Best New Comedy 2019); Breathing Corpses; Other Hands; and adaptations of Jane Austen's The Watsons and Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet. Dr Sophie Bush is Associate Head at the Sheffield Creative Industries Institute, Sheffield Hallam University, UK. She is the editor of Methuen Drama Student Editions of Our Country’s Good (2020), Top Girls (2018) and My Mother Said I Never Should (2015), and a GCSE Student Guide to My Mother Said I Never Should (2015). She is also the author of The Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker (2013) and co-author of The Theatre of Laura Wade (2025).

Laura Wade's play is a 90-minute masterpiece, a jewel, dark but translucent. It is a play of love, death and grief: the grief that is hardest to bear, because it begins before the loved one dies.

• ChronologyContextsEnvironmentalismNatural burial movementChanging attitudes to death and griefThemesDeath, mortality, grief and letting goTrauma cultureSeasons, natural cycles and regeneration, climate changeControl/loss of controlFamily conflictBody, eating and body imageMiscommunication and reconciliationCare and motheringPlay as PerformanceNaturalismLanguage of the dialogue (including class identity) Stanislavski's system of working on a roleIndoor/outdoor alternating scene structureAesthetics of 'cold'Importance of props (eg. coffin) Production HistoryKey productions in UK, US, Europe and MexicoCritical ReceptionOverview of scholarly work (bodies in trauma and motherhood) Behind the Scenes Interview with Laura WadeFurther Exploration Laura Wade's Breathing Corpses and Other HandsPolly Stenham's That FaceLeaves by Lucy CaldwellThe Knot of the Heart by David EldridgeThe Children by Lucy Kirkwood COLDER THAN HERENotes to the Play