Rebecca Lenkiewicz

Rebecca Lenkiewicz is a playwright, poet and actress. Her first play Soho: A Tale of Table Dancers won a Fringe First at the Edinburgh Festival, while her second play The Night Season won the 2004 Critics Circle Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright. Lenkiewicz’s other plays include Shoreditch Madonna, Blue Moon Over Poplar and Her Naked Skin, which premiered in 2008 on the Olivier stage at the National Theatre, making her the first living female playwright to achieve this.

Rebecca Lenkiewicz was born in Plymouth, Devon and now lives in south London. Since the success of Soho: A Tale of Table Dancers, which Rebecca also acted in, and The Night Season, she has established herself as one of the UK’s most prominent female playwrights. In January 2006 she and Abdul Kareem Kasid created a new version of The Soldier’s Tale set in Iraq, a music theatre piece by Igor Stravinsky and Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, staged at the Old Vic. In April 2008 her new adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People opened at the Arcola Theatre, directed by its founder Mehmet Ergen.

Lenkiewicz’s newest play Her Naked Skin, directed by Howard Davies, premiered on the Olivier stage at the National Theatre in July 2008 and received 4 Stars in the Evening Standard, the Guardian, the Independent and Time Out. The Daily Telegraph described Her Naked Skin, a play about the suffragettes and set in Holloway prison, as “an outstanding new play…bursting with high-definition performances.” Lenkiewicz has also written two BBC radio plays, Fighting for Words and Caravan of Desire, which aired in 2005 and 2006 respectively.

“Epic in scale, huge in the staging, sure-handed in the storytelling, Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Her Naked Skin occupies the demanding space of the National’s huge Olivier theatre with power and panache. Given (astonishingly) that this is the first play by a living female playwright in this landmark space since the National’s opening in 1963, the subject of the play — the suffragettes — could not have been better chosen.”
Natalie Bennett

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