“Judy’s my mom. It’s an understatement to say she’s a bit of a hippy. I mean who else but a New Ager calls their baby ‘Philosophy Rainbow’? I try to go by ‘Sophie’.”

Sophie and Calliope have never been to school. Their mum ran away from home when she was seventeen to join the New Age movement and the girls have been raised in Goa, San Francisco and Morroco at a series of ashrams, communes and impromptu raves. Then one day Sophie gets ill and the family has to return to Birmingham. Sophie and Calliope are introduced to a strange new world where meditation and tree-hugging are replaced with Maths homework and television. They’re also introduced to Daphne: the grandmother that the girls have never met. And it’s against this bewildering new backdrop – the normality she’s always longed for – that Sophie must come to terms with her own mortality.

[A] brave, beautiful and quite extraordinary play
The Stage (more)

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"We are where we come from"? That's not true. Because if that's true there's no hope for any of us."

Lori is coming home from her first term at university. Its only been a few weeks and already things have gone badly wrong. But none of the rest of the family knows, or understands, what really happened. In this fiercely observed family drama, three teenage girls struggle to define who they are, and why, and where they might be going.

LEAVES premiered in Chapel Lane, Galway, on 1st March 2007 before transferring to the Royal Court Theatre (Upstairs), London. The play won the 2006 George Devine Award and the 2007 Susan Smith Blackburn Award.

Cast: Fiona Bell, Alana Brennan, Conor Lovett, Daisy Maguire, Penelope Maguire, Kathy Rose O'Brien Director Garry Hynes; Set Design: Francis O'Connor; Lighting Ben Ormerod; Sound: John Leonard; Music: Sam Jackson

Feuilles, Séverine Magois's translation of Leaves, directed by Mélanie Leray for Theâtre des Lucioles premièred at the Théâtre National de Bretagne in Rennes on February 26, 2009, starring David Jeanne-Comello and Valérie Schwarcz. The translation, by Séverine Magois (who won a Molière in 2005 for her translation of The Browning Version) has been published by Les Editions théâtrales with the support of the Centre national du livre

Praise for "Leaves"

This is an unmissable play… This is Lucy Caldwell's first full-length play, but it has the maturity, thoughtful compassion and controlled theatricality of experience.
John Peter, The Sunday Times

[A] highly promising first play.
Michael Billington, The Guardian

Caldwell is spectacularly good. […] Caldwell has done a remarkable job of character creation, each one a totally credible, rounded individual; she also has an extraordinary grasp of the reality of suffering, as well as the triggers of self-preserving selfishness.
Emer O'Kelly, Irish Independent

Caldwell's evocation of the imperviousness of depression to logic, and the heartbreaking isolation which results is exceptional, as is her understanding of the relationship between siblings in their most tender and vulnerable years.
Mary Coll, Irish Independent

Leaves dramatises the stresses of this desolate situation with unblinking insight and quiet, rueful humour.
Paul Taylor, Independent

Caldwell digs deep, touches on raw pain and the result is moving.
Sarah Hemming, Financial Times

[A] strikingly mature work, both upsetting and, in the end, uplifting.
Quentin Letts, The Daily Mail

Acutely perceptive… Thoughtful and sensitive.
Sam Marlowe, The Times

And they all told us we were crazy, everyone told us we were crazy. But we knew we were right. And now, I think: what if we were wrong? What if they were right, after all, and we were wrong?

Bright twenty-somethings Molly and Conor have been married for a year. Forced to relocate to Conor's family-home in Belfast, their love and understanding of each other is brought irretrievably into question. In Guardians, the beautifully crafted follow-up to Lucy Caldwell’s George Devine Award-winning play Leaves, Caldwell explores what happens when our expectations come up against reality, and how easy it is to miss our step. Guardians is directed by Natalie Abrahami, joint Artistic Director of London's Gate Theatre: 'A director of exceptional flair' Guardian.

Cast Molly: Sonya Cassidy Conor: Andrew Simpson

Director: Natalie Abrahami Dramaturge: Ben Power Design: takis Lighting: Matt Prentice Sound: Steve Mayo Video Projection: Dick Straker for Mesmer Voice: John Tucker Casting: Camilla Evans Production Manager: Jae Forrester Stage Manager: Al Orange Assistant Stage Manager: George Moustakas

Praise for "Guardians"

"Guardians" review by Michael Billington ( Guardian, 5 May 2009).
4 stars

Now in its third year, the High Tide festival is based in the small Suffolk town of Halesworth and exists primarily to promote new writing. It has already notched up a big success with the London transfer of Adam Brace's Stovepipe. Having seen two of the three plays on show this year, I would confidently predict an afterlife for Lucy Caldwell's Guardians: the second in a Belfast trilogy that began with Leaves, seen at the Royal Court in 2007.

Caldwell's gift is for exploring the texture of domestic unhappiness. In Leaves, she dealt with the impact on a middle-class family of their daughter's aborted suicide. Here, she shows how young love can go disastrously wrong. Molly is an American doing a thesis on post-conflict societies, and Conor is a Belfast-born law student. Having met and married hastily in Indiana, they come to Northern Ireland to house-sit for a year in Conor's parental home. Although they seem very much in love, rifts soon appear: Molly feels an outsider in Belfast and finds her academic work blocked, while Conor is unable to cope with Molly's idealised vision of him as a talented musician. Within a few months they part, apparently irrevocably.

What Caldwell understands very well, in a manner reminiscent of Rattigan, is the inequality of passion: Molly simply has a capacity for love more profound than that of her young husband. While the theme may not be startlingly original, Caldwell invests it with a wealth of enlivening detail. Denied a family wedding herself, Sonya Cassidy's wonderfully touching Molly sits alone desolately watching home movies of other people's nuptials. There is something equally poignant about the admission of Andrew Simpson's law-obsessed Conor that he is not as interesting as his wife once thought.

Caldwell may be a miniaturist, but she writes with real power about lost love and, although I found Natalie Abrahami's production sombrely underlit, I was much moved.

Michael Billington "Guardian"

Lucy Caldwell's tale of a young apprentice luthier on the West Bank in Palestine premiered as part of Spinning the Times, a series of pieces by five Irish playwrights produced by Origin Theatre Company as part of the New York 1st Irish Festival at 59E59 Theaters in September 2009

Praise for "The Luthier"

The best of [the plays] is “The Luthier” by Lucy Caldwell, about a Palestinian youth who is learning to repair violins. Ethan Hova gives a beautiful performance
New York Times

Fugue and The Luthier tread ground that has been covered before, but both are nonetheless rich in their humanity. … Ethan Hova stars in The Luthier, as a Palestinian man trying to carve out a peaceful life in a world that refuses to yield to his nature. A luthier is an artisan who repairs violins; Dawood dreams of practicing his craft in the U.S. as he remembers pivotal, tragic moments from his past here in Gaza. Both David and Dawood are refugees because of ancient hatreds afflicting their homelands; from their circumstances can we learn compassion for problems that, here in America, always seem so far away?
NYTheatre.com

The Luthier, by Lucy Caldwell, takes us to Palestine where Dawood (Ethan Hova) fixes violins. "Except for fire, there is no damage which cannot be repaired," he says. While he may be able one day to save violins, Dawood cannot restore the damage the persistent bombings have wreaked on his friends and family. It is a portrait of senseless violence and innocence destroyed, and Hova's understated performance is heartfelt and sweet, even in the face of horrific destruction.
TheatreMania.com

Two sisters, taken in by a Romany carnival troupe during the wars of the 1990s find themselves at the end of the road in Belfast 2008. They face a choice; stick and stay with the dying Carnival, or twist and step onto the
bottom rung of Belfast life?

Some lies are more believable than truth

Kabosh’s Carnival, by Lucy Caldwell, played the Ulster Bank Festival at Queens, through 23rd October to the 1st November. Over 1,500 people entered the exotic surroundings of the Spiegeltent to witness performances by Maggie Cronin, Vincent Higgins, Liam McMahon, Patrick O’Reilly, Tanya Wilson, Claire Lamont and Paul Kennedy, as they brought to life the story of Katya and Illena, two girls trapped in the Romany carnival which has reached the end of line. Featuring stunning aerial artistry from Kelsey Long, and the extraordinary music of Oleg Ponomarev and Drazen Djerek, Carnival brought the full force of theatrical performance to the Festival’s most unique venue.

Girl from Mars

“I came home because they found a body. It was two weeks before my twenty-first birthday and a month before my final exam results were out. Which meant I was almost exactly as old as she was. As she was.”

Five years ago, almost to the day, Eleanor’s big sister Amy disappeared. At about 3pm on a Saturday afternoon she walked out of the house and no-one ever heard from her again. They never found out what happened to her, either. Until now…

Girl from Mars was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday 3rd June 2008 .

Girl from Mars won the Imison Award which perpetuates the memory of Richard Imison who devoted his entire career to radio drama and to developing new talent. Of "Girl from Mars" the judges said:

"This is a gripping and powerful depiction of the effect on a family when one sibling goes missing. The beautifully-told story begins when a body is found and the remaining daughter returns to be with her family while they await identification. Girl From Mars is moving and emotionally taut. It veers away from sentimentality and felt personal and believable. The structure is complex - combining three different timescales - and uses radio to its full potential, using many techniques including voice-overs, dialogue, text messages, and voice mail. The story has a shades-of-grey resolution about the way a person's life can tragically stop short - and this is echoed in he subtle way the writer ends her own play too."

Praise for "Girl from Mars"

Kate Chisholm The Spectator, Wednesday, 25th November 2009

‘Show, not tell’ is probably the best tip you can give anyone who wants to write; and the most difficult thing to achieve. It’s so tempting to stuff everything in, to give away all the evidence too soon or describe every last detail down to the colour of the gunman’s eyes, just to make sure that your readers have followed the plot. It’s an even more difficult technique to master in a radio play, where you might think that ‘telling’ is what matters. How else can your listeners understand what on earth is going on when they have no visual clues? But as any fan of radio drama knows, it’s what’s left out that counts; the absence of information gives the listener licence to invent, filling in the blank spaces with your own imagined scenarios. (It’s like sitting on the Tube or bus and wondering about the life story of the person squashed right up against your ear.)

The winning playwright in this year’s Imison Award (given to the best original script by a writer new to radio, organised by the Society of Authors in memory of the great champion of radio drama, Richard Imison) kept us guessing until the end of her play, and even then left us with a conundrum: ‘Whatever happens we’re not going to know what happened or why.’ It takes guts in a writer to abandon your listeners just at the point when they need you most, to resolve everything neatly and provide them with an upbeat ending on which to finish the ironing, or struggle round the M25. Lucy Caldwell’s award-winning play, Girl from Mars (Radio Four, Monday), took us right inside the horror of losing your sister (or daughter), suddenly, one afternoon, without explanation or any telling clues. There’s an open door, and a full teapot on the table, but no Amy, and nothing to suggest why she is no longer in her flat in Belfast. Five years later, a body is discovered in the River Lagan, just close by. Will it be hers? (read more)

"Lucy Caldwell is a writer making waves in both drama and novel writing.Girl From Mars,her drama of a family frozen intime and yet inexorably changing after a daughter/sister goes missing was full of the tiny details and irritations which accompany tragedy" Read More…

Avenues of Eternal Peace

Lucy Caldwell's "Avenues of Eternal Peace" - the Afternoon Play on BBC Radio 4, on 4 June 2009 - focussed on the horrific events in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago. Student couple Kai-Liang and Chang Li join the Tiananmen Square protests, where their passions and ideas are put to the ultimate test.

Avenues of Eternal Peace was chosen as a 'Pick of the Week' on Radio 4,