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 Is it an accident when Nanny places him in a handbag and her unpublished novel into the pram? In 1998 a new baby is stolen and an academic discovers an unpublished novel of more than usual revolting sentimentality.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.