Kieran Hurley Plays 1: Hitch; Beats; Heads Up; Mouthpiece; The Enemy

Multi-award-winning Scottish playwright Kieran Hurley has been making waves since the early 2010s with his vivid storytelling and searing honesty, creating plays acutely concerned with society and community, and deeply enmeshed in Scotland’s local political context.

Tracking the evolution of Hurley’s work from his early solo shows to his later large-cast plays and featuring an introduction by Scottish theatre critic Joyce McMillan, this is an exciting collection showcasing one of the UK’s most exciting creators of politically-engaged theatre.

The plays collected are:

Hitch (2010): a previously unpublished solo show about Hurley’s hitchhiking trip to the 2009 G8 meeting in L’Aquila, exploring the meaning of political protest.

Beats (2012): a coming-of-age story exploring the aftermath of the 1994 Criminal Justice Act outlawing raves. It was adapted into a film in 2019, garnering nominations for BIFA Best Debut Screenplay and WGGB Best Screenplay.

Heads Up (2016): a ferocious piece of storytelling asking what we would do if we found ourselves at the end of our world as we know it. (Winner of the Fringe First Award 2016.)

Mouthpiece (2018): an unflinching Edinburgh-centric two-hander which examines whether it’s possible to tell someone else’s story without exploiting them along the way. (Winner of the Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh Award 2019.)

The Enemy (2021): a provocative and timely drama offering a uniquely Scottish take on Henrik Ibsen’s timeless work An Enemy of the People.

Kieran Hurley is an award-winning writer, performer and theatre maker based in Glasgow. Theatre includes The Enemy (National Theatre of Scotland), Mouthpiece (Soho Theatre & Traverse Theatre), Square Go (Paines Plough), A Six-Inch Layer of Topsoil And The Fact It Rains (Perth Theatre), Heads Up (Show And Tell), An Injury (Ovalhouse Theatre), Rantin (National Theatre of Scotland), Beats (Show and Tell & Soho Theatre), Chalk Farm (ThickSkin), Hitch. Film includes Beats (Sixteen Films/Wild Bunch/Altitude/BFI/Creative Scotland) and radio includes Edinburgh (BBC Radio 4).