In 2022, The Wonder, for which Birch co-wrote the screenplay with Sebastián Lelio and Emma Donoghue, adapted from Donoghue's novel of the same name, premiered. [65] [66] Bibliography [ edit ] What is powerfully brought home is a litany of what some women endure. Mental illness, infanticide, domestic violence, drug addiction and appalling parenting are all there. A drug addict tries to burgle her parents’ home and is later seen soliciting for prostitution and later still having to be fatally subdued in gaol. A vulnerable woman naively falls in love with a violent man; in due course she tries but fails to get into a refuge. |Alice Birch’s heartbreaking new play reaches across society to explore the impact of the criminal justice system on women and their families. Jones, Alice (2019-10-16). "Alice Birch on her new play, writing Succession and adapting Normal People". inews.co.uk . Retrieved 2022-11-15. Birch doesn’t want to say too much about the new NT show – she’s in the rehearsal studio honing it this week – but she hints that it’ll be close to the spirit of Revolt. Created in collaboration with the the anarchic dance-theatre collective RashDash and titled We Want You to Watch, it will depict the journey of two female characters as they take on the porn industry and attempt to pull the plug.

Birch spent the first five years of her life living with her family at a commune. Because her parents were unmarried, they decided to give Alice and her sister the last name Birch after the commune's name, Birchwood Hall. [1] She studied English at Exeter University but didn’t get too involved in theatre, apart from directing “an incredibly long, very bad” production of Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, starring Vanessa Kirby. “I didn’t love university. I was just really keen to get going. I knew what I wanted to do. I was quite bored, quite easily.” BLANK ] isn’t simply a playtext, but a theatrical provocation; a blueprint from which theatre-makers can shape their own narratives and build their own productions. Indeed, no two versions of [ BLANK ] are ever likely to be the same, yet every single production will have an indelible bond with the next.Despite these inconsistencies, Aberg’s [BLANK] still boasts plenty of excellent moments. Chief among these are three spellbinding scenes: “Carrier Bags” is between two foster children (Zaris-Angel Hator and Taya Tower, both brilliant), one of whom militantly divides up their room to keep their stuff separate. “Transference” depicts a mother (an enchantingly restrained Thusitha Jayasundera) who receives the news of her daughter’s prison suicide from a nervous social worker (Jemima Rooper). And finally, a magnificent, 45-minute “Dinner Party” scene—which is dazzling enough to be a play of its own—features the whole cast in its relentlessly acerbic takedown of liberal hypocrisy. Fisher, Mark (1 August 2018). "A desire for Duras: Katie Mitchell and Alice Birch on the writer's erotic, existential mystery". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 17 March 2020. After the experimental fireworks of Revolt and We Want You to Watch, her Orange Tree play, Little Light, comes as a surprise. Though no less candid, it’s more domestic in scale, focusing on two sisters meeting for Sunday lunch (one sister seems on the verge of doing something ghastly with a carving knife) and coming to terms with a bitter secret from their past. Her second feature will be an adaptation of the Graham Swift novel Mothering Sunday for Number 9 Films and Film 4. She will also adapt bestselling novel The Silent Patient for Plan B. At 18, Birch joined the Royal Court Theatre’s young writers programme and spent a three-month unpaid internship in Los Angeles working for the film production company BenderSpink. [2]

Nice to MITEM you: the 10th edition of the Madách International Theatre Meeting Opens in the Hungarian Capital 27th September 2023 Gillmor, Alison (19 November 2022). "Food for thought". Winnipeg Free Press . Retrieved 21 November 2022. From the Archive: BushGreen meets Alice Birch". bushtheatre.co.uk. 3 November 2014 . Retrieved 23 March 2020. In 2019 Clean Break celebrated our 40th Anniversaryby embarking on an ambitious journey todocument the remarkablestory of the company.Over two years we established our archive atthe Bishopsgate Institute, interviewed42 women from across our 40year history and stagedexhibitionsto share our story of theatre, feminism and justice. As the issues pile up - poor parenting, mental health problems and urban loneliness - the criminal justice system appears to be broken: even when it tries to help an imprisoned pregnant woman, by offering her a place in a mother and baby unit, it turns out that this is located a huge distance away from her children. In this dark vision of troubled women everyone is imprisoned, whether they are literally incarcerated or not. In a show in which some scenes are just seconds long, everywhere you look you see solitary women and lost children. A shadow of damage pervades the whole evening, with the threat of suicide ever present.

Breaking in – 1999–2001

Birch co-wrote the play Astronauts with a group of 16-19 year olds who later performed the work. [1] Astronauts was inspired by the housing crisis. The play premiered in 2014 with Company Three. [15] Little Light is one of Birch's first plays, though it was not performed until 2015 when it premiered at the Orange Tree Theatre. [16] [17] a b Tartaglione, Nancy (1 November 2017). " 'Lady Macbeth' Leads British Independent Film Awards Nominations – Full List". Deadline . Retrieved 6 March 2020.

So far all of her screenplays have been adaptations (or “midwifery” as she calls it), which are slightly less painful than plays. “You have to be really careful of over-romanticising the pain and the torture of the writer, but if I feel like I’m phoning it in, it doesn’t work. I believe that you can tell when the work has cost the maker in some way – that doesn’t mean you have to be ripping your hair out, or bawling your eyes out, but you have to go through something. You have to feel a little bit changed by the end of writing it. Otherwise, what was the point?” a b Jones, Alice (16 October 2019). "Alice Birch on her new play, writing Succession and adapting Normal People". inews.co.uk . Retrieved 7 March 2020.Ourexistence is based on the injustice women face in a criminal justice system built for men, bymen. The drivers for women’s offending are tightly linked with mental health, addiction, trauma,domestic and sexual violence.Too oftenwomen struggle to accesssupport and find themselvespunished by a system that does not understand or meet their needs, and frequently exacerbatesthem. Throughout the 1980s, members of Clean Break led and supported the Close H-Wing Campaign, participating in protests and raising awareness through theatre and film. In 1984, 20 of the 35 inmates participated in a mass hunger strike for over two weeks to demand transfer to another prison. Despite these efforts, HMP Durham’s H-Wing was not closed until 2005 – after it was deemed unsuitable for housing female prisoners following several suicides, and 34 years after it was described as ‘inhumane’ for housing male prisoners.

My sister and I were the only children there for a long time, and when all the adults ate together, we’d be sat at the table or under it, listening hard. There were pretty shared values there politically, but still lots of debate, conflict and drama. Dinner party scenes are still my favourite things to write. And I’d always be in a corner, reading. Bowie-Sell, Daisy (1 June 2011). "Many Moons, Theatre503, London, review". The Daily Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235 . Retrieved 17 March 2020.

Introduction

Evans, Gareth Llŷr (13 September 2019). "Orlando review – Katie Mitchell's gleeful celebration of gender fluidity". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 18 March 2020. In her note to the script, Birch calls her method “a challenge and an invitation” for each producing team to make their own play. It is useful to remember that Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information (2012) had a similar premise, though Birch’s approach is admittedly more flexible, barely prescribing any rules. Hence, Aberg’s all-female staging of this work creates a distinct play of its own—one that centers Birch’s scenes on the precarity of vulnerable, abused, and neglected women. [BLANK] was originally co-commissioned by the National Theatre and Clean Break, a leading theatre company working with women affected by the criminal justice system; so it is no wonder that the Donmar production, also co-produced by Clean Break, attempts to ground this self-consciously malleable play around this guiding concern.