Nick Payne
| Nick Payne | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1984 |
| Occupation | Playwright, screenwriter |
| Nationality | British |
|
| |
Nick Payne (born in 1984) is a British playwright and screenwriter.
Early life and education
Payne studied at the University of York and subsequently at the Central School of Speech and Drama. He is also a graduate of the Royal Court Young Writer's Programme.
Career
In 2008 Payne worked at the bookshop of the National Theatre.[1] His first play If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet opened at the Bush Theatre in October 2009 and received a positive response from critics at the Evening Standard and the Financial Times. It won the George Devine Award. In September 2012 it was staged at New York's Laura Pels Theatre, starring Jake Gyllenhaal.[2]
Payne's second play Wanderlust opened in September 2010, directed by Simon Godwin, at the Royal Court Theatre upstairs and also garnered excellent reviews. In November, Payne was shortlisted for the Evening Standard's Most Promising Playwright Award, but lost out to Anya Reiss.
He took part in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty Six Books, for which he wrote a piece based upon a book of the King James Bible.
Constellations opened at Royal Court Theatre on 13 January 2012. Directed by Michael Longhurst and starring Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins, it explores love, friendship and the notion of free will against the backdrop of quantum physics. It was extremely well received, with Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph commenting that "Nick Payne's drama lasts just over an hour but packs in more than most shows manage in three times that length. It is playful, intelligent and bursting with ideas, but also achieves a powerful undertow of emotion"[3] while Paul Taylor in the Independent wrote that "one would be hard put to begin to do justice to the dazzling way it creates it own [sic] rules, while at the same time being wise enough not to jettison the old rule book either".[4] It transferred to the Duke of York's Theatre in November 2012. That month it won the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Play.[5] In January 2013 Payne revealed that a film adaptation was under way.[1] This plan was later shelved.
In August 2013 his play The Same Deep Water As Me opened at the Donmar Warehouse, with a cast including Nigel Lindsay, Daniel Mays and Marc Wootton. In January 2014 Blurred Lines, a piece he devised with the director Carrie Cracknell, opened at the National Theatre's Shed. In 2014, two episodes of The Secrets which were written by Payne will be broadcast on BBC One.
Incognito was a co-production between Live Theatre, nabokov, HighTide Festival Theatre and in association with The North Wall in spring 2014, which previewed at Live Theatre in April 2014, before going to HighTide Festival and The North Wall, Oxford. It returned to Live Theatre in May and then had a sell-out run at The Bush Theatre, London. Incognito was produced in New York by the Manhattan Theatre Club with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation at New York's City Center.[6] The play stars Charlie Cox, Heather Lind, Morgan Spector, and Geneva Carr and is directed by Doug Hughes.
The American premiere of Constellations opened on Broadway in January 2015 at Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, starring Academy Award nominee Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson. Constellations reunites Gyllenhaal with Payne and Longhurst, who are also making their Broadway debuts with the production. The three previously collaborated on the American premiere of If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet. It will be directed by Michael Longhurst.[7] In November, 2016, Constellations opened at Canadian Stage in Toronto, under the direction of Peter Hinton.[8]
Works
Stage
- Flourless rehearsed reading at the Soho Theatre 2006
- Lay Down Your Cross rehearsed reading at the Royal Court Theatre 2007
- Switzerland Hightide Theatre Festival 2008
- If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet Bush Theatre commissioned by Paines Plough 2009
- Starling reading at Royal Court as part of the Royal Court Young Writers Festival 2009
- The Lost Mariner 2010
- Interior adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck's book The Gate Theatre 2010
- Wanderlust 2010
- One Day When We Were Young 2011 Paines Plough & Sheffield Theatres[9]
- One of the short plays forming part of Sixty Six Books Bush Theatre
- Constellations 2012 Royal Court Theatre
- The Same Deep Water As Me 2013 Donmar Warehouse
- Incognito 2014 Hightide Festival and Bush Theatre
- The Art of Dying 2014 Royal Court Theatre
Film
- The Sense of an Ending (2016) – Screenwriter
References
- 1 2 "Lift off for the writer with stars in his eyes". Independent, 2 January 2013. Matilda Battersby]
- ↑ "If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet, Laura Pels Theatre, New York". Financial Times, review of New York production, 24 September 2012, by Brendan Lemon
- ↑ Daily Telegraph review of Constellations, 20 Jan 2012.
- ↑ Independent review of Constellations, 20 Jan 2012.
- ↑ Bloomsbury Publishing (7 November 2013). Whitaker's Shorts 2014: The Year in Review. Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 319–. ISBN 978-1-4729-0615-1.
- ↑ "Sloan Science & Film". scienceandfilm.org. Retrieved 2016-05-27.
- ↑ "Jake Gyllenhaal Will Make Broadway Debut Starring in Nick Paynes 'Constellation' " playbill.com
- ↑ "Constellations gives us highlight reel of a hundred relationships: review". Toronto Star, Carly Maga, Nov. 11, 2016
- ↑ Plough, Paines. "Paines Plough". www.painesplough.com. Retrieved 2016-05-04.