Shelagh Stephenson

Shelagh Stephenson is an English playwright and actress.

Stephenson was born in Sagswiall in Northumberland and read drama at Manchester University.

She worked in her father's butcher shop until she was 13 when she found her love for writing plays after her mother took her to see her first stage-show for her 13th birthday. She was immediately gripped and moved by the performance and found a passion for writing plays

Stephenson's stage plays include The Memory of Water (1997), An Experiment with an Air Pump, Ancient Lights, Five Kinds of Silence (radio play 1996; stage play 2000), Mappa Mundi (2002) Harriet Martineau and The Long Road (2008) which was written in collaboration with the UK-based charity, The Forgiveness Project, to critical acclaim.

Her plays frequently deal with new advances in science, such as the concept in the title of her first stage play, and including commentary on possibly pseudoscientific fads like urine therapy or phrenology in Harriet Martineau. Methuen Publishing Ltd published a collected edition of all four of these Stephenson plays in 2003.

An Experiment with an Air Pump was revived in 2009 at Hampstead Theatre, where the original production appeared in 1998 after premiering at the Royal Exchange, Manchester; the play has been since revived at the universities of San Diego and New Orleans, the English Theatre, Berlin, the University of Waterloo and the Giant Olive Theatre Company, in London. Harriet Martineau was performed by Live Theatre, in November 2016.

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