Mark Ravenhill

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Mark Ravenhill (born 7 June 1966) is an English playwright, actor, and journalist. His productions include Shopping and Fucking (first appeared in 1996)), Some Explicit Polaroids (1999), and Molly House (2001).

At the 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, he made his acting debut in his monologue Product.

He often contributes to The Guardian's arts section.

He is Associate Director of The King's Head Theatre in London.

Early life

Ravenhill is the elder of two sons born to Ted and Angela Ravenhill. He grew up in West Sussex, England, and honed an early interest in theater, performing his brother's plays when they were eight and seven years old, respectively. He studied English and Drama at Bristol University from 1984 to 1987, worked as a freelancer, workshop leader, and drama coach. Ravenhill was diagnosed as HIV+ in the mid-1990s, his late 1990s partner who died of AIDS.

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Career

Max Stafford-Clark, artistic director of Out of Joint Theatre Company, was captivated by his first short play, Fist, who wanted to see his next performance. Ravenhill finished the game that would make his name: shopping and fucking. It is directed by a largely young, queer group of friends and spanned a decade of attempts to correct a fundamental lack of history, value, and political involvement. The production toured extensively at the Royal Court Theatre and then the West End, before embarking on world tours. It was one of the British plays that had been picked up by German theatres to produce a new generation of directors, writers, and audiences.

Faust Is Dead (1997), Handbag (1998)), Some Explicit Polaroids (1999), Ravenhill continued this tradition with a string of plays portrayed Shopping and Fucking's punky, genderqueer violence, including Faust Is Dead (1997), Faust Is Dead (1998)). The plays did not necessarily reflect the characters' attitudes and contained humour underneath the brutality and ferociousness. Faust is Dead explored some queer post-modern concepts, with nods to Jean Baudrillard; Some Explicit Polaroids used some elements of the 'State of the Country Play', a legendary left-wing theatre style of the 1970s. Each play embraced and critiqued the intellectual styles and movements in which they were engaged.

Handbag was a retort to Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, which made it more apparent that contemporary identities are linked to a long history. This was brought to the forefront in Mother Clap's Molly House, which is set in an eighteenth-century Molly House and depicting a variety of gender-nonconservists from a pre-gay, pre-queer period of dissident sexualities. The play was directed by Nick Hytner, who took over as the National Theatre's artistic director a year later, and brought Ravenhill as a key advisor.

Ravenhill went further away from naturalism into the 2000s, constantly changing styles and forms. His play The Cut takes Pinteresque territory, a metaphorical representation of a near-future society based on an unspecified surgical procedure (the 'cut' of the title) was an allegory of liberal authoritarianism. Getting Treasure Repeate began as a series of short (usually 20-minute) plays performed over several mornings at the Edinburgh Festival in 2007, under the title Breakfast with Ravenhill (for which he received the Spirit of the Fringe award). Shoot Get Treasure They were performed by the Gate Theatre, the Royal Court, the National Theatre, Paines Plough, and others throughout London. The bulk of the plays' titles are based on western literary canons, as well as satirical commentaries on western complacency, the Iraq War, and others. (2005), a product of two people (the second actor is silent) was a satire of Hollywood and attitudes toward terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11. Ravenhill himself appeared on the original tour. The pool (no water) was designed for the Frantic Assembly and worried a group of artists who mourned and mourned the death of their respected colleague; the text was written in fragments, examining the Young British Artists' speech patterns and artistic rivalry's hypocrisy. Each of these books shifts away from direct representations of the modern world to something more abstract, minimalist, metaphorical.

Despite this, Dick Whittington (2006), a play for, about and performed by drag performer Bette Bourne, a Life in Three Acts (2009), and Scenes from Family Life (2007).

In the 2010s, his reach widened even more. Ravenhill collaborated with Ramin Gray in directing his own Over There, a highly experimental play and performance about twins separated by the Berlin Wall for the Royal Court at the end of the 2000s. He worked in music theatre, writing libretti for Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea and a new music-theatre piece for Ten Plagues, which were released in 2011). He produced a new translation of Brecht's Life of Galileo, as Writer-in-Residence for the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as a dramatization and a salute to Voltaire's Candide (both 2013). He collaborated with Robbie Williams and Guy Chambers on a musical version of David Walliams' "The Boy in the Dress" at the end of the decade (2019). The London Gay Men's Chorus had commissioned him for a special piece to celebrate the choir's 21st anniversary in 2012. The piece, Shadow Time, by Conor Mitchell, delves into the evolution of mental attitudes in the context of homosexuality in the Chorus' lifetime, and it premiered at the Royal Festival Hall in May 2012 during The Chorus' summer concert: A Band of Brothers. He returned to the Royal Court in 2018 with The Cane, about a schoolteacher whose distant history as an enforcer of corporal punishment threatens his reputation, his family, and even his life.

Vicious, an ITV sitcom that aired between 2013 and 2016, and Of Chaos Time The For Big Finisher, Gary Janetti's film aired in 2014.

Ravenhill was named co-artistic director of the King's Head Theatre in 2021, 2022. Ravenhill said in a 2021 interview with Benjamin Yeoh, that he was attempting to introduce more queer and LGBTQ+ work as a co-artistic curator.

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