Death of a Cyclist (NHB Modern Plays)

By Steve Waters

Told by a woman killed in a cycling accident, Death of a Cyclist is a poignant, bleakly comic monologue that imagines the moments after death, and our struggle to come to terms with the biggest shock of all.
This play is taken from Steve Waters: Shorts, five short plays from acclaimed playwright Steve Waters, all of them deeply personal accounts of his attempts to make sense of twenty-first-century Britain and an ever-changing world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Release date: Mar 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781780018690

Steve Waters

Steve Waters’ plays include Limehouse (Donmar Warehouse; Temple (Donmar Warehouse); Why Can’t We Live Together? (Menagerie Theatre/Soho/Theatre503); Europa, as co-author (Birmingham Repertory Theatre/Dresden State Theatre/Teatr Polski Bydgoszcz/Zagreb Youth Theatre); Ignorance/Jahiliyyah (Hampstead Downstairs); Little Platoons, The Contingency Plan, Capernaum (part of Sixty-Six Books; Bush, London); Fast Labour (Hampstead, in association with West Yorkshire Playhouse); Out of Your Knowledge (Menagerie Theatre/Pleasance, Edinburgh/East Anglian tour); World Music (Sheffield Crucible, and subsequent transfer to the Donmar Warehouse); The Unthinkable (Sheffield Crucible); English Journeys, After the Gods (Hampstead); a translation/adaptation of a new play by Philippe Minyana, Habitats (Gate, London/ Tron, Glasgow); Flight Without End (LAMDA). Writing for television and radio includes Safe House (BBC4), The Air Gap, The Moderniser (BBC Radio 4), Scribblers and Bretton Woods (BBC Radio 3). Steve ran the Birmingham MPhil in Playwriting between 2006 and 2011 and now runs the MA Creative Writing: Script at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of The Secret Life of Plays, also published by Nick Hern Books.

Book preview

Epub cover

Steve Waters

DEATH

OF A

CYCLIST

art

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Dedication

Original Production

Character

Death of a Cyclist

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Steve Waters

I have lived two lives as a playwright; on the one hand writing for theatres in cities designed to stage new work for audiences that like new work and in front of critics who (sometimes) like new work. Then alongside this I have written the plays collected here; written from within a region, often playing in non-theatrical spaces, often made in collaboration with other artists, often under the radar of critical view and the noise that accompanies new plays. I am proud of both