Young Marx is a comedy set in 1850's London, where Karl Marx, is hiding in Dean Street, Soho. Broke and restless, the play portrays the thirty-two-year-old revolutionary as a frothing combination of intellectual brilliance, invective, satiric wit, and child-like emotional illiteracy.Creditors, spies, rival revolutionary factions and prospective seducers of his beautiful wife all circle like vultures. His writing blocked, his marriage dying, his friend Engels in despair at ...

Why has middle manager Stephen England got up in the night and defecated on the living room carpet? His wife Judith doesn't know, nor does his mother Irene. Only Andy, the gauche youth who regularly turns up uninvited to borrow his power tools, can save him (or destroy him).Mr England was produced at the Sheffield Crucible, October 2000.

I want theatre to be sweaty, exciting, unpredictable….Mike Bradwell is on a mission to revolutionise British theatre. He's sick of fancy plays by dead blokes and wants to tell stories about real people, living real lives. And it doesn't get more real than Hull.In a freezing cold house on Coltman Street, a motley crew of unemployed actors gather to improvise a play with no name, no plot, no budget and no bookings.Richard Bean's (The Hypocrite, One Man, T...

"I'm a scientist. I don't 'believe' in anything."The study of climate science is the cool degree at the university where Dr Diane Cassell is a lead academic in Earth Sciences. At odds with the orthodoxy over the causes of climate change, she finds herself increasingly vilified and is forced to ask if the issue is becoming political as well as personal. Could the belief in anthropogenic global warming be the most attractive religion of the 21st century. What evidence do we need befo...

Four plays by Richard Bean with an introduction by Chris Campbell. Includes: Harvest, In the Club, The English Game and Up on Roof.'Funny, poignant with a heart as big as a house, this is a rich Harvest indeed.' The Daily Telegraph on Harvest'It is rare to spend two hours of unadulterated pleasure in a theatre, even for somebody who occupies theatre seats on a constant basis. This play...is beautifully crafted, well written and as funny as anything currentl...

Lee, a soldier returning to Hull from two tours of Afghanistan, joins a losing pub quiz team. The team is: Lee, specialist subject - "how to kill a man with your bare hands"; Woody, specialist subject - "hallucinogenic drugs"; and Bunny, specialist subject - "the containerisation of Hull docks"! What they need is a bit of class, a bit of history of art, a bit of literature, a bit of posh totty. Melissa has come to Hull to regenerate the city. Maybe she can be a shot of viagra for a particu...

A riotous new comedy from award-winning playwright Richard Bean, author of One Man, Two Guvnors.April 1642. Sir John Hotham, Governor of Hull, is charged by Parliament to secure the arsenal at Hull and deny entry to King Charles I. If only it were that simple. With a Royalist siege outside the city walls and the rebellion of the mob within, Civil War seems inevitable and losing his head more than probable.

Seven men come together to bake enough bread to feed the population of Hull. It’s just another Sunday. Nellie's so worn down from a lifetime making dough, he loses his vest in the mix. First, Owen Man's on a promise. The ovens are cranked up and running, and the wholemeal's pleasingly big going in. But there's a spanner in the works which threatens bread production in Hull for good, and life as they know it for the men on the shift.Toast is Bean’s second play, first performed at th...

‘Fucking Frogs! My grandfather didn’t die in the English Civil War so’s half the population of France could come over here and live off the soup!’A riotous journey through four waves of immigration from the 17th century to today. As the French Huguenots, the Irish, the Jews and the Bangladeshis in turn enter the chaotic world of Bethnal Green, each new influx provokes a surge of violent protest over housing, jobs, religion and culture. And the emerging pattern shows that white flig...

War, poverty, corruption, spiralling taxes, bad behaviour, inter-personal violence and over-population. Do these things worry you?Middle-aged manager Ted, hits on a utopian plan to change the way we live in this darkly funny play.

He talks about going to Switzerland, to that place where you pay them to kill you… And I say “go! It'll do you good. Broaden your horizons…you've never been abroad!After sixty years of marriage, happily settled into their retirement village in Yorkshire, Jack and Florence have elevated bickering almost to the status of high art. That said, they're otherwise getting along fine with the support of a cousin and the hilarious interventions of the man known loc...

It’s the worst job in the world and only those what is born to it, what has gorrit in the blood, can do it.Three generations of Hull men struggle with the legacies left to them by their fathers. A powerful and moving story of fate, choices and men at work, Under the Whaleback opened at the Royal Court Theatre in August 2002.