The Baby (NHB Modern Plays)

Rome, 78 BC. The ruler, Sulla, has just died, and professional mourners have been appointed to wail at his state funeral. But Sulla was hated by the poor and the working classes, and the wailers - led by Macu - threaten to strike, with dire consequences for them and for Macu's daughter... Written in vivid, contemporary language, Chris Hannan's modern epic The Baby is about a polyglot, violent city at the heart of a divided nation. The play was first produced at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, in October 1990, directed by Michael Boyd. 'An epic play humanised by Hannan's concerns for the lives of ordinary people caught up in events seemingly beyond their control' The Times 'A period epic complete with all the trappings you would expect from the great Elizabethan and Jacobean classicists who wowed their audiences with heightened language, earth-shattering emotion, weighty moral dilemmas, lowbrow comedy and disturbing, bloody tragedy.' Scotland on Sunday 'Chris Hannan's new play explores love and the grief it can engender when marred by circumstances. And for the fullness of that grief, add in anger and guilt, distraction to the point of self-destruction, and bewildered hurt that makes flesh feel as if skin would burst, it is so uncontainable. The context is Ancient Rome but the issues are timeless and on-going... touching directly on any place or age where ordinary lives are wracked by power politics.' The Herald

Chris Hannan is playwright and novelist. His plays include Elizabeth Gordon Quinn (Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 1985; revived by the National Theatre of Scotland in its inaugural season in 2006); The Evil Doers (Bush Theatre, London, 1990; Time Out Award and Charrington London Fringe Best New Play Award); Shining Souls (Traverse, 1996, revived by the Old Vic in 1997; winner of a Scotland on Sunday Critics Award and a Lloyds Bank Playwright of the Year nomination); The God of Soho (Shakespeare's Globe, 2011); The Three Musketeers and the Princess of Spain (Traverse, English Touring Theatre, Coventry Belgrade, 2011) and What Shadows (Birmingham Rep, 2016). As well as original plays, Hannan has adapted Crime and Punishment (Glasgow Citizens' Theatre/Liverpool Playhouse/Lyceum Edinburgh, 2013) and The Iliad (Lyceum Edinburgh, 2016); and also made new versions of Ibsen's The Pretenders (RSC, 1991), Gogol's Gamblers (Tricycle 1992), and Stars in the Morning Sky (Coventry Belgrade, 2012). His 2008 novel Missy was awarded the McKitterick Prize for a debut novel.