MANY MEN’S WIFE

Many Men’s Wife was commissioned by the Tricycle Theatre in London in September 2006. It premiered at the Tricycle on October 2006, directed by Charlotte Westenra.

Many Men’s Wife, by Amy Evans, starts folk-style, with three Sudanese men flirting charmingly in Khartoum with the woman who, smiling, serves them tea. Only when one man alone proves importunate does she suddenly reprove him. She comes from Darfur, where she has already had many husbands, sometimes four or five at a time, taking turns on her, in the towns they were destroying. Her thunderbolt-out-of-the-blue is one of the few dramatic masterstrokes I have encountered in new playwriting this year …

– Alastair Macaulay, Financial Times

UNSTONED

UnStoned was commissioned by the National Youth Theatre of London in May 2006. It premiered at Soho Theatre in London in August 2006, directed by Diana Quick and performed by members of the National Youth Theatre.

To me, the 80s are best characterised by two things: fear and acts of resistance. In the US, under the watchful eye of Ronald Reagan, crack cocaine and Aids would become the decade’s Hurricane Katrina. From my vantage point in middle America, where whole countries were swept aside in the classroom, I struggled to understand the words being used to describe the world around me: “sanctions”, “carnage”, “concede”, “abate”.

When the NYT commissioned me to write a play set in the 80s, I decided to tell the story of how 200 kids climbed over the Berlin Wall and fled to the east. I wanted to revisit this time, where fear was balanced by acts of resistance, and remind audiences that it is possible to fight water cannons and police tanks with stones, and win.

– Amy Evans, The Guardian

THE BIG NICKEL

The Big Nickel was commissioned by the National Youth Theatre of London in May 2005. It premiered at Soho Theatre in August 2005, directed by Ché Walker and performed by members of the National Youth Theatre.

REASON FOR LEAVING

Reason for Leaving was presented as a staged reading at the Joseph Papp Public Theater’s annual New Work Now! series of new plays, under the direction of Elizabeth Diamond, in October 2004. It was presented in November 2004 at the Royal Court Theatre Young Playwrights’ Festival of play readings in London, directed by Emily McLaughlin.

WHISPER

Whisper was commissioned by Context Theatre Company UK with the aid of an Arts Council Grant award in January 2003. It was presented as a staged reading at the Cambridge Drama Centre Hotbed Festival in November 2003 under the direction of Zoe Svendsen.

ACHIDI J’S FINAL HOURS

Achidi J’s Final Hours was joint winner of the Verity Bargate Award in November 2002. It premiered at the Finborough Theatre in London in May 2004 directed by Ché Walker.

You don’t expect a young African-American dramatist to write a play about Germany. But Amy Evans’s award-winning first play has a strangely elliptical, expressionist quality that places it firmly in a European tradition of writers like Koltes, Handke or Kane.

In a series of short, brutally fragmented scenes, Evans depicts the fate of a Senegalese immigrant called Isa. She meets Alex, an out-of-work decorator, tentatively shacks up with him and eventually bears his child. But, excluded from his social and familial life by her race and existing in a xenophobic urban climate, Isa leaves him to live with a Senegalese female activist. Alex’s claim to the child, reinforced by police brutality, precipitates the climactic disaster.

– Michael Billington, The Guardian

© Al Laufeld 2004

This is, by some distance, the best play that I have seen this year. Bracing, intense and tragic, it is evidently based on real life events. It is compellingly, convincingly performed and succeeds in combining its political message with a tragedy caused by human foibles … The Finborough Theatre often stages plays with political points to make and, on this occasion, records a resounding success … This is an unmissable play which portrays the chilling reality faced by many Third World immigrants to Western Europe.

– Glen Baker, Morning Star