The Arts
April 2025
Beautiful doom
The work of Dennis Kelly on stage and screen
by Jacqueline Bolton, Nicholas Holden
Dennis Kelly's award-winning plays have been translated into over thirty languages and produced on six continents. His endlessly inventive vision has produced a diverse body of work for a variety of audiences across a range of forms, genres, and media, from the Olivier and Tony Award-winning Matilda the Musical (2010), to the Channel Four cult-classic series Utopia. His 2008 play DNA, written for National Theatre Connections, is a set text on the AQA GCSE English Literature syllabus. This collection of essays written by leading scholars, teachers, and practitioners of theatre provides the first multi-authored study of Kelly's critically acclaimed oeuvre. Featuring an original interview with Kelly himself, this volume captures the full range and scope of his writing for stage and screen, from the quirky fringe debut Debris (2003) to the globally-distributed film adaptation of Matilda the Musical (2022).
