Across Oka

Description

"Robert Holman is the quiet man among modern British dramatists. But his new play...is an outstanding work that sings with truth" (Michael Billington, Guardian) Eileen and her grandson Matty, 16, travel to Russia to stay with scientist Pavel and his son Nikolai, 14, on the Oka reserve where they are to take part in an experiment to save the Siberian Crane from extinction. When the two boys, Matty and Nikolai are given the responsibility of travelling into the wilds, the clash of their personalities, education and experience provokes in Matty an appalling destructiveness. Across Oka was premiered at The Other Place (RSC) in 1988. "Robert Holman's Across Oka is about metamorphosis and manipulation in the lives of passionate, gentle people in north Yorkshire and eastern Russia, the first opent to all experience, the second constrained by the discipline of an enclosing state...The new play is alive with theatrical confrontation and generosity of spirit." (Michael Ratcliffe, Observer)

Robert Holman was born in 1952. He was awarded an Arts Council Writers' Bursary in 1974, and since then has spent periods as resident dramatist with the National Theatre and with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-Upon- Avon. His plays include The Natural Cause (Cockpit Theatre, 1974); Mud (Royal Court Theatre, 1974); Outside the Whale (Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 1976); German Skerries (Bush Theatre, 1977, for which he won the George Devine Award); Other Worlds (Royal Court Theatre, 1983); Today (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1984); The Overgrown Path (Royal Court Theatre, 1985); Making Noise Quietly (Bush Theatre, 1986); Across Oka (Royal Shakespeare, 1988); Rafts and Dreams (Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 1990); Bad Weather (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1998); Holes in the Skin (Chichester Festival Theatre, 2003); and Jonah and Otto (Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, 2008). He has also written a novel, The Amish Landscape (1992). In 2010 he collaborated with David Eldridge and Simon Stephens on A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky, which premiered at the Lyric, Hammersmith.