Jez Butterworth hasn’t written prolifically for theatre. In fact he has written seven stage plays in nearly twenty five years but three of them have been, arguably, the defining plays of their decade.

Laura Wade’s plays return to formal inventiveness with wit and imagination. This inventiveness is counterpointed by an insistent fascination with England as it struggles to define itself in the face of accelerating redundancy. This counterpoint has led to be one of the most exciting bodies of work in contemporary playwriting.

A prolific and successful television and radio writer, David Eldridge has defined himself as a dramatist with force and clarity, humanity and capacity for contradiction with which he has built a dramatic version of London’s East End.

There are a handful of figures in the history of the Royal Court Theatre that define the place. They carved the path that, whether they are aware of it or not every artist that has worked here after them is attempting to travel down. One of that handful is the Welsh actor, director and playwright Peter Gill.

The debt that recent years of black British playwrights owes to Winsome Pinnock has been celebrated and is unarguable. While upholding and championing her cultural presence as a figure of enormous importance in the recent dramatising of Black experience in the country, she has dramatised the existential catastrophes brought about by capital and gender inequality as much as by the innate racism of the legacy of British colonialism.

Zinnie Harris has been a presence in the new writing scenes of her home country of Scotland and in London alike. In that time, no writer has drawn so fully and with such imagination from the classical cannon of dramatic literature. Harris’s plays are creatures steeped in their dramatic past. Classical heritage sits in her own original work as freshly as in those adaptations.