Contractions: Modern Plays

Mike Barlett's debut, My Child (Royal Court, May 2007) saw him hailed by The Stage as 'one of the most exciting new talents to emerge in recent times'. He has worked with various theatres since graduating, including Paines Plough, the Royal Court, Soho and Hampstead. He is a winner of the Old Vic New Voices Award for Artefacts (Bush Theatre, February 2008), and is currently participating in the prestigious Pearson Playwrights Scheme. He won the Writer's Guild Tinniswood and Imison prizes for his radio play, Not Talking.

"An intensely disturbing experience...We are careering towards a society, Bartlett implies, that sees all and understands nothing...It's grotesquely funny - and it chills to the bone." Sam Marlowe, The Times, 05.06.08 "Contradictions...speaks with brutally entertaining, bullet-point directness to the slaving, anxiety-ridden middle-classes...This two-hander is often ferociously funny while being absolutely appalling...Bartlett rustles up one humiliation after another - achieving an Orwellian finesse in his depiction of absolute power." "The needling precision of of Bartlett's language and the toxic swirling clouds of subtext that lie couched in every silence." Dominic Cavendish, Daily Telegraph, 05.06.08 "Bartlett's chilling black comedy [is] an allegoric satire upon a world in which freedom's boundaries close in upon you and an individual's intimate relations are subject to surveillance and control by omnipotent authority." Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard, 05.06.08 "Bartlett, in the manner of early absurdist plays by Havel or Ionesco, takes a plausible premise to a lethal conclusion." Michael Billington, Guardian, 05.06.08 "What we witness here is a form of torture, for all its apparent civility." Paul Taylor, Independent, 06.06.08