Birthday

Joe Penhall's latest play Haunted Child opened at the Royal Court in December 2011. Previous plays include his debut Some Voices, which won him the John Whiting Award and which he later adapted for film, premiering at Cannes in 2000, and Dumb Show in 2004. His other credits include Blue/Orange at the National Theatre, which transferred to the West End and for which he received Olivier, Evening Standard and Critics' Circle Awards and Landscape with Weapon at the National Theatre. For film, he most recently adapted The Road by Cormac McCarthy. He also wrote the screenplay for Enduring Love and wrote the BBC2 detective series Moses Jones.

Penhall's gruesomely entertaining new comedy … Penhall is onto an absolute winner here, taking an inspired idea and using its inversion of normal biological procedure to breed a fertile mix of existential questions and corporeal, sometimes gross-out humour ... there’s nothing out there that cuts with anything like this double-edged finesse to the heart of how we manage the whole birth business in this country and to the core of vexed issues about who does what in modern relationships.