Mark Ravenhill
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Mark Ravenhill (born June 7 1966) is one of England's leading contemporary playrights. He is mainly known for his play Shopping and Fucking.
Mark Ravenhill exploded onto the London stage with his play Shopping and Fucking in the late 1990s, joining the already loud crowd of young, British writers that were later grouped under the term In-Yer-Face Theatre. The combination of seedy subject matter (including simulated sex and drug-taking) with an utterly contemporary attitude and a black sense of humour and morality made Shopping and Fucking an instant smash, which toured internationally.
His works since haven't spread as widely, but he's continued to intrigue. "Handbag" combines a modern story of gay and lesbian marketing executives attempting to have a child with a prequel to Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest that explains how the baby was lost in the handbag in the first place. Some Explicit Polaroids tells of a recently-released prisoner, who discovers the extremist ideological politics that drove him to his crime no longer make sense in the increasingly commerical world of New Labour Britain. Mother Clap's Molly House deals with the relationship between alternate sexualities and commerce, in both an historical and modern context.
He was also one of four writers to contribute to Sleeping Around, a modern variation on Schnitzler's La Ronde that, again, addresses the relationship between personal desires and commerce. In 2006, he has two plays premiering in London - The Cut at the Donmar Warehouse, starring Ian McKellen, and Citizenship at the Royal National Theatre (as part of the triple bill Burn/Chatroom/Citizenship).