The playwright who taught Simon Stephens how to see

On Robert Holman’s Rafts and Dreams, slowness, and the things theatre cannot explain away

There is a particular kind of courage involved in choosing Rafts and Dreams as the first play a new podcast discusses.

It isn’t a safe pick. Robert Holman is not a household name, even among theatregoers who care deeply about British drama. Rafts and Dreams has never been revived in the West End, never been turned into a film, never generated the kind of cultural afterlife that sustains a play in the public conversation. It sits, quietly extraordinary, in the catalogue of a writer who spent nearly five decades making work that resisted almost every available shortcut to recognition.

And yet Simon Stephens — Olivier and Tony Award winner, adaptor of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, one of the most performed English-language playwrights in Germany, author of Punk Rock and Seawall and Pornography — calls Robert Holman his favourite playwright. His hero. His secret crush.

That tells you something. It tells you what Every Brilliant Play is for.

The play at the centre of this conversation is, on its surface, almost defiantly undramatic. Rafts and Dreams, first staged at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1990, begins in a domestic register: Hetty, an obsessive-compulsive woman who fears contamination, and her soldier husband Leo, and their neighbour Neil, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse who is studying to become a doctor. They are digging up the roots of a tree in Leo’s garden.

And then the world ends. Not with war or plague or fire, but with water. The roots give way to an underground lake. The lake swells and expands. London disappears. The world disappears. Leo builds a raft from his living room and they float — the three of them, and others they encounter on the open water — across the drowned surface of the earth. In pursuit, as the play puts it, of themselves, of forgiveness, of love, and of the ability to be loved.

That movement — from the tightly domestic to the apocalyptic, from the rooted to the adrift — is the signature of Holman’s imagination. He is a writer who understood that the most extraordinary theatrical images are not decorative. They are inevitable. They arise from the characters and their circumstances with the logic of a dream, which is to say they feel both impossible and completely true.

Three lines from Simon Stephens in this conversation stay with you long after the listening is done.

“I think there’s a dignity to slowness.”

It is, on reflection, a radical thing to say. We live in a cultural moment that rewards pace: the quick take, the instant opinion, the drama that declares its intentions in the first thirty seconds and delivers on them before the credits. Theatre itself is not immune. The pressure on new writing to hook an audience fast, to justify its existence through incident and forward momentum, is felt by every playwright working today.

Holman refuses all of this. His plays take their time. They proceed at the speed of actual human thought and feeling, which is rarely urgent and often circular and sometimes simply still. In Rafts and Dreams the characters float. They argue and they forgive and they argue again. They drift. The play trusts that the audience will drift with them, and finds in that drift a particular kind of attention — the kind you bring to something precious and not fully understood.

Slowness, in Holman’s hands, is not a failing. It is a form of respect. For the characters, for the audience, and for the experience of being alive in time.

“It’s a play defined by mystery.”

This is the harder thing to articulate, and Stephens is careful with it. The mystery he is identifying is not vagueness or obscurity in the pejorative sense — it is not that the play is confused or unfinished. It is that Rafts and Dreams holds open the questions it raises rather than resolving them. The flood does not mean one specific thing. Neil’s history of abuse bears on everything that happens without explaining it. The raft that Leo builds from his living room is not a symbol that can be decoded and set aside. It is the image that the play requires and that continues to resonate because it cannot be paraphrased.

This is a harder quality to trust than slowness, and rarer. Most plays, if pressed, will tell you what they mean. The responsible thing — the thing that critics and dramaturgs and audiences tend to reward — is the legible play, the one that earns its meaning through clear cause and effect. Holman trusts something else. He trusts the image itself to carry a weight that explanation would only diminish.

Michael Billington, reviewing a 2003 revival, described the play as suspended between “desperate optimism and desperate despair” — adding, in a phrase that seems almost contradictory but lands exactly right, that it left audiences “at peace with yourself.” That paradox — despair and peace, mystery and clarity — is what a Holman play feels like when it is working. You do not leave knowing more than when you arrived. You leave feeling something has been honestly seen.

“Sometimes you can’t dramaturg wonder.”

This is the line that does the most work, and probably the one that will follow listeners out of this episode and into everything they see next.

To dramaturg something — in the theatrical sense — is to make it work: to interrogate its logic, to identify what is unclear or unconvincing, to push the writer toward earned meaning. It is invaluable work. It is how most plays that began as ideas become the plays that audiences can follow and feel. Dramaturgy is, at its heart, the craft of making wonder explicable.

And Stephens is saying: that process has limits. There are plays — this play — in which the wonder cannot survive explanation. Where asking “but what does it mean?” destroys the thing you are asking about, the way too much examination kills the quality you were hoping to understand. Rafts and Dreams does not reward the question “why does the world flood?” It rewards the act of watching the world flood and letting yourself be moved by it.

This is, implicitly, a statement about what theatre can do that other forms cannot. A novel can explain. A film can resolve. A play — a great play, a play of the kind Holman was interested in making — can hold you inside an experience that exceeds its own logic, and trust you to carry it with you into the world where you will spend the rest of your life making sense of it.

Robert Holman was born in Guisborough, North Yorkshire, in 1952. He died in 2021. He was a Resident Dramatist at both the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. He wrote his first plays at the age of twenty for local theatres; his last, A Breakfast of Eels, was staged at the Print Room at the Coronet in 2015. He wrote seventeen produced plays across nearly five decades, and he is not nearly famous enough.

Simon Stephens first encountered Holman in script meetings at the Royal Court in 2000, when both were attached to the building. He has written about the experience of first reading Holman’s work with the fervour of someone describing a private revelation — a writer he discovered rather than was taught, a playwright he might have missed entirely if the timing had been different. They went on to co-write A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky in 2010, alongside David Eldridge, a play about family and apocalypse and the end of the world that bears, in its title alone, traces of Holman’s particular gift for enormity.

To open Every Brilliant Play with this conversation is to make a statement about what the podcast cares about: not celebrity, not currency, not the plays that everyone is already talking about. The plays that matter. The writers who show what the form is actually capable of. The work that, as Stephens might put it, cannot be dramaturged.

Check out our sister podcast: DTF: Doing The Fringe.