Mark Ravenhill (born 7 June 1966) is an English playwright, actor and journalist.
Ravenhill is one of the most widely performed playwrights in British theatre of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His major plays include Shopping and Fucking (first performed in 1996), Some Explicit Polaroids (1999), Mother Clap's Molly House (2000), The Cut (2006), Shoot Get Treasure Repeat (2007) and The Cane (2018).
In 1999 he was one of the recipients of the V Europe Prize Theatrical Realities awarded to the Royal Court Theatre (with Sarah Kane, Jez Butterworth, Conor McPherson, Martin McDonagh).
He made his professional acting debut in his own monologue Product, at the 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
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Early life
Ravenhill is the elder of two sons born to Ted and Angela Ravenhill. He grew up in West Sussex, England and cultivated an early interest in theatre, putting on plays with his brother when they were eight and seven, respectively. He studied English and Drama at Bristol University from 1984 to 1987, and worked as a freelance director, workshop leader and drama teacher. In the mid-1990s, Ravenhill was diagnosed as HIV+, his partner of the early 1990s having died from AIDS.
Career
His first short play, Fist, gained the attention of Max Stafford-Clark, artistic director of Out of Joint Theatre Company who asked to see his next play. Ravenhill quickly finished the play that would make his name: Shopping and Fucking. It is set among a mostly young, queer group of friends and captured a generation using sex, drugs, popular culture and therapy to replace a fundamental lack of history, value and political commitment. The play toured with two successful runs at the Royal Court Theatre and then the West End, before embarking on world tours. It was one of the British plays that were picked up by German theatres to establish a new generational wave of directors, writers, and audiences.
Ravenhill followed this with a series of plays that shared Shopping and Fucking's punky, gender-queer aggression, including Faust Is Dead (1997), Handbag (1998), Some Explicit Polaroids (1999). The plays did not necessarily share the attitudes of their characters and contained ironic commentary beneath the violence and intensity. Faust is Dead explored some queer post-modern ideas, with nods to Jean Baudrillard; Some Explicit Polaroids adopted some features of the 'State of the Nation Play', an epic left-wing theatre style associated with the 1970s. Each play simultaneously endorsed and critiqued the intellectual styles and movements that they were working in.
Handbag was a response to Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, making more explicit a sense of contemporary identities being connected to a longer history. This was brought even more to the fore in Mother Clap's Molly House, set in an eighteenth-century molly house and depicting a range of gender-nonconformists from a pre-gay, pre-queer era exploring dissident sexualities. The play was directed by Nick Hytner who became artistic director of the National Theatre the year after, bringing in Ravenhill as a key advisor.
Through the 2000s, Ravenhill moved further away from naturalism, continually changing styles and forms. His play The Cut moves into Pinteresque territory, its metaphorical image of a near-future society organised around an unspecified surgical procedure (the 'cut' of the title) was an allegory of liberal authoritarianism. Shoot Get Treasure Repeat began as a series of short (usually 20-minute) plays performed over successive mornings at the Edinburgh Festival in 2007, under the title Breakfast with Ravenhill (for which he received the Spirit of the Fringe award). Retitled collectively Shoot Get Treasure Repeat they were performed across London by the Gate Theatre, the Royal Court, the National Theatre, Paines Plough and others. Product (2005), his monologue for two people (the second actor is silent) was a satire of Hollywood and attitudes to terrorism post-9/11. pool (no water) was written for the physical theatre company Frantic Assembly and concerned a group of artists who lament and celebrate the death of their successful colleague; the text was written in fragments, observing the speech patterns of the Young British Artists and the hypocrisies of artistic rivalry. Each of these texts move away from direct representations of the contemporary world towards something more abstract, minimalist, metaphorical.
Plays
Fist (1995)
Shopping and Fucking (1996)
Faust Is Dead (1997)
Sleeping Around (1998)
Handbag (1998)
Some Explicit Polaroids (1999)
Mother Clap's Molly House (2000)
Feed Me (Radio Play) (2000)
Totally Over You (2003)
Education (2004)
Citizenship (2005)
Product (2005)
The Cut (2006)
Pool (No Water) (2006)
Ravenhill For Breakfast (2007)
Scenes From Family Life (2007)
Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat (2008)
Over There (2009)
The Experiment (2009)
Nation (2009)
Ten Plagues - A Song Cycle (2011)
Candide (2013)
Ghost Story (2015)
The Cane (2018)
The Boy in the Dress (2019)
Ben and Imo (2024)
Opera translations
The Coronation of Poppea by Monteverdi (2011)