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Handbag
Handbag
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Author: Mark Ravenhill Publisher: Samuel French Format: Softcover # of Pages: 76 Pub. Date: 2016 ISBN-10: 0573704422 ISBN-13: 9780573704420 Cast Size: 3 women, 3 men
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About
the Play:
Handbag is a full-length dark comedy by Mark Ravenhill.
Two gay couples, one male and one
female, join forces to have a baby, thinking that four parents will
be better for bringing up a child than only two.
Handbag, subtitled The
Importance of Being Someone, is inspired by Oscar Wilde's The
Importance of Being Earnest. Twenty-eight years before The
Importance of Being Earnest,
a young woman gives birth to a baby boy. Is it an accident when Nanny
places him in a handbag and her unpublished novel into the pram? In
1998 a new baby is stolen and an academic discovers an unpublished
novel of more than usual revolting sentimentality. From Victorian wet
nurses to 1990s sperm banks, we are ultimately brought to question:
"Who really is fit to raise a child?" Handbag
reveals issues of society that were
true not only a hundred years ago, but also today in an age of
diverse sexualities, biological engineering and Tiny Wink's handbag.
Handbag was first
performed in 1998 at the Lyric Hammersmith Studio in London as part
of a 12-week national tour and won an Evening Standard award. The play has becen performed in regional repertory, fringe festival, and college theatre productions.
Cast: 3 women, 3 men
What people say:
"In Shopping and Fucking, Mark
Ravenhill made theatre relevant to the Thatcher
generation. Now he's put videos and Net-surfing in Faust. And it's no
less stunning." — The Guardian
"There are few stage authors
writing more interestingly than Mark Ravenhill... He is - it is now
yet more evident - a searing, intelligent, disturbing sociologist
with a talent for satirical dialogue and a flair for sexual
sensationalism ." — Financial Times
"A promising idea awaits
dramatic payoff in Handbag, the Mark
Ravenhill play that — whatever else its achievements —
confirms that the author of Shopping and Fucking is no one-play
wonder." — Variety
"Handbag
entertainingly and sometimes jarringly explores the timeless
search for love, acceptance and meaning in what’s often an
unwelcoming world." — Washington Blade
About the Playwright:
Mark Ravenhill is an English playwright, actor, director,
and journalist. He studied English and Drama at Bristol University
from 1984–1987, and held down jobs as a freelance director,
workshop leader and drama teacher. After staging a ten-minute
dialogue called, Fist, as part of the I'll Show You Mine
season of shorts at London's Finborough pub theatre venue, he was
prompted to write a larger scale work that burst on to the theatre
scene in 1996 as the huge hit Shopping and Fucking (sometimes
billed as Shopping and F**king).
One of the most distinctive contemporary UK playwrights, he was
appointed Associate Director of London's Little Opera House at The
King's Head Theatre in September 2010. He played an active role in
the venue's relaunch as London's third Opera House. In 2012, he
became Writer in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). He
often writes for the arts section of The Guardian.
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