Robert Holman

Robert Holman

Robert Holman (1952–2021) was a British playwright whose work has been produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court Theatre, as well as in the West End and elsewhere. He is celebrated for the passionate humanity and quiet intensity of his plays, especially for his triptych of short plays, Making Noise Quietly, which was first seen at the Bush Theatre, London, in 1986, and has since been revived and adapted as a film (2019).

His plays include: Mud (Royal Court Theatre, 1974); German Skerries (Bush Theatre, 1977, and revived at the Orange Tree Theatre, 2016); Rooting (Traverse Theatre, 1979); Other Worlds (Royal Court Theatre, 1980); Today (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1984); The Overgrown Path (Royal Court Theatre, 1985); Making Noise Quietly (Bush Theatre, 1987, and revived at the Donmar Warehouse, 2012); Across Oka (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1988); Rafts and Dreams (Royal Court Theatre, 1990); Bad Weather (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1998); Holes in the Skin (Chichester Festival Theatre, 2003); Jonah and Otto (Royal Exchange Theatre, 2008, and revived at the Park Theatre, 2014); A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky, co-written with David Eldridge and Simon Stephens (Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, 2010); A Breakfast of Eels (Print Room at the Coronet, 2015); and The Lodger (Coronet Theatre, London, 2021).

He also wrote a novel, The Amish Landscape, published in 1992.

A play about freedom, guilt and the possibility of redemption, premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
A gripping play about the nature of violence.
The second play in Robert Holman's acclaimed trilogy of short plays, Making Noise Quietly.
The third in Robert Holman's acclaimed trilogy of short plays, also called Making Noise Quietly.
The first of the three plays that make up Robert Holman's acclaimed dramatic trilogy Making Noise Quietly.
An acclaimed trilogy of plays exploring the impact of war on ordinary lives.
A humane, funny and ultimately haunting play that explores masculinity, identity and what it means to be English.
An intense, elusive, and quietly beautiful play about a family crisis.
An uplifting portrait of human hope and vulnerability, weaving resonant drama out of a friendship, a marriage, a holi...
An enlightening, cathartic and acerbic new play about identity, maturity and reconciliation.
A dark and disturbing portrait of mental illness, and its effects on a young family.
Mud
A group of lonely people converge on the North Yorkshire moors, in Robert Holman's first full-length play.
A gorilla is taken for a French spy by an eighteenth-century fishing community on the isolated North Yorkshire coast,...
From a Cambridge college to the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War, Today is a panoramic study of life, d...
An aspiring academic arrives on a Greek island to interview a reclusive scientist, in a play about history and the st...