Nina Raine – författare

Johann Sebastian Bach, irascible and turbulent, writes music of sensuous delight and deep religious fervour. He's touchy, he's fabulously rude, he has impossibly high standards (he stabs a bassoonist for playing badly), and he's constantly in trouble with his patrons.Music is the family business – but the burden of their father's genius weighs heavily on his sons. Wilhelm is brilliant but self-destructive. Tense, industrious Carl is more successful than his father, but knows he is less talented. As the years pass, their rivalry provokes furious arguments about love, God and above all music. What is it for – to give pleasure, like a cup of coffee in the sun, or to reveal the divine order that gives life its meaning?Beautiful, profound and funny, Nina Raine's play Bach & Sons is a gripping family drama and an anthem to the art that draws us together and sings of our common humanity. It premiered at the Bridge Theatre, London, in June 2021, directed by Nicholas Hytner, with Simon Russell Beale playing J. S. Bach.

'I thought everyone's parents spoke like that. Then I realised.'A penetrating play about belonging, family and the limitations of communication.Billy's family, like every other, is a club, with its own private language, jokes and rules. You can be as rude as you like, as possessive as you like, as critical as you like. Arguments are an expression of love, and after all, you love each other more than anyone in the world. Don't you?But Billy, who is deaf, is the only one who actually listens. When he meets Sylvia, he decides he finally wants to be heard.Nina Raine's play Tribes was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in October 2010. It won Best New Play at the Off-West End Theatre Awards.Tribes had its US premiere at the Barrow Street Theatre, Off-Broadway, in 2012, winning the 2012 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Foreign Play.

'Do you know what it’s like to be the person who’s actually sticking the knife in here? Or here? You stick a knife in close to an artery, boy do you know it. Then you’re in tiger country.'Nina Raine's Tiger Country is a hospital play that follows a tangle of doctors and nurses in a busy London hospital.Professionalism and prejudice, turbulent staff romances, ambition and failure collide in this swirling, action-packed drama about an overburdened health service that we all depend on and the dedicated individuals that keep it going.'Tiger country' is where animal instinct stirs and an irrefutable eye opens. Where we make eye contact with the unknown.Tiger Country was premiered at Hampstead Theatre in 2011 and, following its sell-out run, was revived there in 2014.

Why is Justice blind? Is she impartial? Or is she blinkered?Friends Ed and Tim take opposing briefs in a rape case. The key witness is a woman whose life seems a world away from theirs. At home, their own lives begin to unravel as every version of the truth is challenged.Consent, Nina Raine's powerful, painful, funny play, sifts the evidence from every side and puts Justice herself in the dock. It premiered as a co-production between the National Theatre and Out of Joint, directed by Roger Michell at the National Theatre in 2017, and transferred to the West End in 2018. It was shortlisted for the 2018 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.

How do you have a baby when you're thirty-nine and single?You decide. But what happens next?The story, like a child, has a life of its own. The story becomes stories…A funny and touching play about the fertilisation of an idea, Nina Raine's Stories premiered at the National Theatre, London, in October 2018.Stories was a finalist for the 2019 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.