The Natural Cause (NHB Modern Plays)
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‘When I was a lad, little kiddie, I had this dream. And that was to burn down the world. Smash it up.’
A dark and disturbing portrait of mental illness, and its effects on a young family.
Barry and Mary are expecting a child. Barry is a bus conductor, but he’d like to drive the bus one day instead. His mother keeps telling Mary that Barry’s not right, and that she should leave him. But Mary chooses to stick with Barry, for better or in fact for worse.
Robert Holman’s play The Natural Cause was first performed at the Cockpit Theatre, London, in May 1974. Although written after his earlier play Mud, The Natural Cause was Holman’s first full-length play to be staged.
Robert Holman
Robert Holman was born in 1952. He was awarded an Arts Council Writers' Bursary in 1974, and since then has spent periods as resident dramatist with the National Theatre and with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-Upon- Avon. His plays include The Natural Cause (Cockpit Theatre, 1974); Mud (Royal Court Theatre, 1974); Outside the Whale (Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 1976); German Skerries (Bush Theatre, 1977, for which he won the George Devine Award); Other Worlds (Royal Court Theatre, 1983); Today (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1984); The Overgrown Path (Royal Court Theatre, 1985); Making Noise Quietly (Bush Theatre, 1986); Across Oka (Royal Shakespeare, 1988); Rafts and Dreams (Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 1990); Bad Weather (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1998); Holes in the Skin (Chichester Festival Theatre, 2003); and Jonah and Otto (Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, 2008). He has also written a novel, The Amish Landscape (1992). In 2010 he collaborated with David Eldridge and Simon Stephens on A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky, which premiered at the Lyric, Hammersmith.
More by Robert Holman
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