Dennis Kelly

An unexpected meeting at an airport leads to an intense, passionate, head-over-heels relationship. Before long they begin to settle down, buy a house, juggle careers, have kids – theirs is an ordinary family. But then their world starts to unravel and things take a disturbing turn. A tragic, violent look at parenthood and trauma.

Girls and Boys

Against the backdrop of a cold Minnesota winter, lottery players hold their collective breath at the thought of winning big on Christmas Day. The jackpot has run up to a red-hot $750 million, the world's richest prize. A bungled convenience store heist triggers a happenstance theft of winning lottery tickets and trips up an insider's scheme to rig the results.Agent Kirchner, an old-school cop reluctantly teams up with a young tech-savvy analyst on an investigation that propels them into the world of numerical probability, conspiratorial politics, international ticket scalpers, counterfeiters, disgruntled players, and illegal immigrants looking to grab the brass ring. Caught in the crosscurrents of those in deadly pursuit of the winning ticket, the investigators are buffeted by unsolved murders, a bomb blast-and the curious giveaway of winning lottery tickets: acts of charity or criminal subterfuge? The whereabouts and redemption of the $750 million jackpot lottery ticket remains a mystery throughout, stirring anger and resentment among the lottery-playing public. The winning ticket, finally, surfaces but before the prize can be claimed a Faustian bargain puts the Kirchner's job on the line.

Blizzard Ball

Orphans

Features the plays Debris, Osama the Hero, After the End and Love and Money. The four plays in this first collection by Dennis Kelly are linked by their characters' desperate need to believe that there is more to life than the often brutal worlds in which they find themselves. Kelly's remarkable debut Debris finds humour and pathos in a spectacularly dysfunctional family unit. The harrowing Osama the Hero shows a group of neighbours taking ill-defined revenge on an odd-ball teenager in a climate of fear. In After the End a woman discovers she has been rescued from Armageddon by a paranoid ex-colleague with a nuclear bunker in his garden. And in a fractured narrative Love and Money portrays a marriage driven to brutal destruction by financial pressures.

Debris; Osama the Hero; After the End; Love and Money

Dennis Kelly: Plays One

A group of teenagers do something bad, really bad, then panic and cover the whole thing up. But when they find that the cover-up unites them and brings harmony to their otherwise fractious lives, where’s the incentive to put things right? DNA is a poignant and, sometimes, hilarious tale with a very dark heart. A contemporary play for younger people, DNA opened at the National Theatre in February 2008

If you could lie without flinching, corrupt without caring and succeed at all costs – how far could you go...how much could you make? From the early promise of the '70s through to unrelenting capitalism of the '80s and '90s, follow George on the journey from innocence to savage greed and knotted honesty, as he invents three golden rule for success, whatever the cost. An electrifying dark tale, this new play from award-winning writer Dennis Kelly marks his Royal Court debut.

The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas

Helen and Danny keep themselves to themselves. But the outside world comes crashing into their lives one day when Helen's brother turns up. Covered in blood. Dennis Kelly's new play is a thrilling contemporary suspense story which takes its audience on a chilling journey into a world just outside the front door. This disturbing urban drama has it's world premiere at the Traverse Theatre on 31st July 2009, reuniting the team that brought Kelly's play After The End to the Traverse Theatre in 2005. After a month's run at the Traverse, it transfers to Birmingham Rep and the Soho Theatre (London).

David conducts an office romance by e-mail. He has love at his fingertips. But a shocking admission unravels his relationship piece by chilling piece. Jess loves David. She believes happiness can be bought - but it doesn't come cheap in a world of easy credit. Jess and David's ideal blend of love and money is killing them. Funny but heart wrenching, this ingenious drama dares us to enter a dislocated world of bad debts and even worse desires.Love and Money opened at the Manchester Royal Exchange in October 2006 with a transfer to the Young Vic, London.

Love and Money

In the 1920s, a teen-age girl, Francesca, leaves her valley in the Italian Alps with her widowed family for the promise of America. In New York the family find work, integrate into the community and adapt to the uncertainties of city life. She finds her skill in drawing and takes to new adventures. But to Francesca these realities are strange dreams. The pictures she makes are somewhere else - she doesn't live in them. She hopes she will find her feelings waiting for her - somewhere ahead in her new life. But memories take her back to her valley, keeping a home that she knows has gone. This is the story of an immigrant girl - forgotten in the place she left, invisible in the place she comes to. Today will find tomorrow, but tomorrow will be somewhere else. So it is her feelings she must find. It is a place we all must leave. It is a journey we all must take.

The Ornament Book

A city under attack from a nuclear blast. As the dust settles, Louise wakes to find herself in a fallout shelter with Mark, the colleague who has saved her life. They have enough water and food to last two weeks. Now they just need to find a way of surviving each other. A chilling post-nuclear play that examines what it takes to endure catastrophe. After the End was originally published in 2005. This revised and updated edition was published to coincide with the London production at Theatre Royal Stratford East in February 2022.

After the End

Lucy Kirkwood

Mark Ravenhill

Across the UK thousands of people are involved in protests and debates, sparked into action by the largest cuts to publicspending since WWII – cuts which are the turning point of a generation, undermining the welfare state, higher education and the arts in one fell swoop. Theatre Uncut is a national theatre event in response to these cuts, bringing together some of the UK’s leading dramatists. Drama groups, universities, youth clubs and theatre companies nationwide joined the event, staging their own versions of the shorts in a national theatrical uprising. Now published in this new collection, Theatre Uncut contains these short plays, addressing audiences who want to think about what the budget cuts really mean, and who they are really hitting. A debate is underway. Protest might begin, minds might be changed, views challenged, ideas formed. Theatre Uncut is a response to a situation that we cannot control, and over which we had no say. Click below to hear an interview with Libby Brodie and Hannah Price of Theatre Uncut:

A Response to the Countrywide Spending Cuts

Theatre Uncut

Once there were two terrible twins called Holly and Sean, who gave their Head Teacher a nervous breakdown. The twins were extremely pleased with themselves. That is, until the new Head Teacher arrived. For you see, the new Head Teacher was - a Troll. That's right. And this Troll Head Teacher soon created all kinds of mad new rules for the pupils and teachers. Can Holly and Sean save the day and stop the Troll from eating their classmates and teachers? Can naughtiness be restored to its rightful place? Will Brussels sprouts and peanut butter be taken off the menu?

Our Teacher's a Troll

Vince Locker's life is tragic. His comedy act for the LaughCom competition has just bombed, ruining any chance of the cash prize he desperately needed. His life is in tatters; abandoned by his father as a child, an estranged wife, Jessica, who he seems to disappoint just by his mere existence, and living in his mother's house with his bipolar brother and facing foreclosure. As he stands on Smith Avenue Bridge, suicide seems the only option until he is unexpectedly rescued by an old school mortician named Truss. Vince meets another of Truss's rescues, Winona. Although beyond social norms, the trio seize on a quick cash fix that just might help Vince meet his child support demands-comedic tributes for the dead. The eulogies are hilarious and off the wall, sometimes disastrous and sometimes enlightening. They propel Vince into the dark underworld of the funeral industry, life insurance scams, savage politics, a kidnapping, the murder investigation of a destitute unclaimed young woman and threats to Jessica and his young daughter. As details of the murdered young woman are slowly revealed, Vince realizes that he has many ghosts of his own to put to rest. The story is a brilliant thought-provoking exploration of grief and death nested in clever humor.

A Comedian Walks Into A Funeral Home

Dennis Kelly's play DNA centres on friendship, morality and responsibility in odd circumstances. When a group of young friends are faced with a terrible accident, they deliberately make the wrong choices to cover it up and find themselves in an unusually binding friendship where no one will own up to what they've done. The play began life as a National Theatre Connections commission in 2008 and has subsequently been produced, studied and toured around the world. DNA is published for the first time in the Methuen Drama Student Edition series with commentary and notes by Clare Finburgh Delijani, which look at the play's context, themes, dramatic form, staging possibilities and production history, plus offers suggestions for further reading.

Size Queen and Other Poems

Debris. Osama the hero. After the end. Love and money

David conducts an office romance by e-mail. He has love at his fingertips. But a shocking admission unravels his relationship piece by chilling piece. Jess loves David. She believes happiness can be bought – but it doesn't come cheap in a world of easy credit. Jess and David's ideal blend of love and money is killing them. Funny but heart wrenching, this ingenious drama dares us to enter a dislocated world of bad debts and even worse desires. Love and Money opened at the Manchester Royal Exchange in October 2006 with a transfer to the Young Vic, London.

They were all in the pub when the explosion happened. Louise wakes up to find herself trapped with Mark, who has saved her life. Mark is always prepared for the worst and has everything he thinks they will need to survive; tinned chilli, Dungeons and Dragons and a knife - now all they need to do is to wait until it's safe to go outside. Can they survive the attack? Can they survive each other? After The End received its world premiere at The Traverse Theatre in August 2005.

Dennis Kelly

Books

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