Joanna Laurens

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Joanna Laurens (April 21, 1978 - ) is an English playwright.

Although born in Bristol, Laurens grew up in Jersey, where she saw very little theatre. She studied french horn at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama before leaving the course to study English at Queen's University of Belfast ^[1].

[edit] Career

Joanna Laurens' plays deal with themes of frustrated sexual desire, love, longing and death. They are characterised by an intense lyricism and a linguistic and poetic experimentation and are often written in blank verse. Using non-naturalistic language, her work is at variance with the naturalism of much 20th Century English theatre and has divided critical opinion ^[2].

Her published output to date consists of three plays and she has also written for radio.

Laurens' first play was The Three Birds. She wrote the play while a student at Queen's, where it was given a public reading ^[3]. The Three Birds opened at the Gate Theatre, London, in October 2000, and was directed by Rebecca Gatward. The play won Laurens the Critics' Circle Theatre Awards for Most Promising Playwright and the Time Out award for Most Outstanding New Talent ^[4].

Five Gold Rings, Laurens' second play — a melodrama of sibling rivalry, marital infidelity and heartbreak, a fraught family re-union set during the Christmas holidays — opened at the Almeida Theatre in December 2003 and was directed by Michael Attenborough.

It was followed by Poor Beck, which opened in 2004 at the The Other Place in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company, directed by Daniel Fish [1]

Laurens is often aligned with Sarah Kane. Michael Billington in the Guardian referred to Laurens as "the most original theatrical voice to have emerged since Sarah Kane" ^[5]. Lyn Gardner in the Guardian also compared Laurens to Kane: "Laurens writes with such murderous beauty that you are put in mind of the late Sarah Kane" ^[6]. Laurens has resisted this alignment, saying "I don't see much comparison" ^[7].

Laurens' work has been much more widely produced in Europe than in the UK, receiving particular attention in Germany ^[8]. She has been writer in residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company and writer on attachment to the Royal National Theatre Studio.