Mark Ravenhill
| Mark Ravenhill | |
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| Born | 1966 (age 50–51) England |
| Occupation | Playwright, actor, journalist |
| Nationality | British |
Mark Ravenhill (born 7 June 1966) is an English playwright, actor and journalist.
His plays include Shopping and Fucking (first performed in 1996),Some Explicit Polaroids (1999) and Mother Clap's Molly House (2001). He made his acting debut in his monologue Product, at the 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. He often writes for the arts section of The Guardian. He is Associate Director of London's Little Opera House at The King's Head Theatre.
Ravenhill is the elder of two sons born to Ted and Angela Ravenhill. He grew up in West Sussex, England and cultivated an interest in theatre early in life, putting on plays with his brother when they were eight and seven, respectively. He studied English and Drama at Bristol University from 1984–1987, and held down jobs as a freelance director, workshop leader and drama teacher.
In 1997, Ravenhill became the literary director of a new writing company, Paines Plough. In 2003, when Nicholas Hytner took over as artistic director of the National Theatre, Ravenhill was brought in as part of his advisory team. In the mid-nineties, Ravenhill was diagnosed as HIV+, his partner of the early 1990s having died from AIDS.
Although he was at the heart of new British playwriting in the 1990s and 2000s, Ravenhill respects historical theatre. He has said that he would like to see directors focus more on the classics and stop producing new plays that don't have as much substance or meaning. In the same article, Ravenhill posits that directors have forced themselves into the "eternal present", rather than expanding their reach to the many different cultures and genres of the past that they have to choose from. Ravenhill has a love of traditional pantomime; he presented a Radio 4 documentary about the form and wrote Dick Whittington for the Barbican Theatre in 2006.
Ravenhill's work has transformed and developed in the 2000s. While his work in the 1990s – Shopping and Fucking, Handbag, and Some Explicit Polaroids for example – may be characterised as trying to represent contemporary British society, his later work has become more formally experimental and abstract. His one-man show Product, which toured internationally after its premiere at the 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, is both a satire on the post-9/11 attitudes to terrorism, and a minutely observed reflection on the limits of language and form to capture contemporary reality. His play, The Cut, opened in 2006 at the Donmar Warehouse starring Sir Ian McKellen; it divided critics with its portrait of a world dominated by the administering of a surgical procedure: the country, the year and the procedure are all unspecified.
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