Chaos

By Laura Lomas

'If the world is chaos, then it means there's no order, and if there's no order, then it basically means that anything is possible'
A girl is locked in a room. A boy brings another boy flowers. A girl has tied herself to a railing. A boy doesn't know who he is. A girl worries about impending catastrophe. A woman jumps in front of a train. A boy's heart falls out his chest. A butterfly has a broken wing.
Laura Lomas's play Chaos is a symphony of dislocated and interconnected scenes. A series of characters search for meaning in a complicated and unstable world. Bouncing through physics, the cosmos, love and violence, they find order in the disorder of each other.
Written specifically for young people, the play formed part of the 2019 National Theatre Connections Festival and was premiered by youth theatres across the UK. It offers opportunities for a large, flexible cast of any size or mix of genders, and can incorporate chorus work, movement and music.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Release date: Feb 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781788503549

Laura Lomas

Laura Lomas is a playwright and screenwriter. Her plays include: The House Party after August Strindberg's Miss Julie (Chichester Festival Theatre / Headlong / Frantic Assembly, 2024); Metamorphoses, co-written with Sami Ibrahim and Sabrina Mahfouz, after Ovid (Shakespeare's Globe, 2021); Chaos (National Theatre Connections); The Blue Road (Dundee Rep, Derby Theatre, Royal & Derngate and Theatre Royal Plymouth youth companies); Joanne (Clean Break & Soho Theatre); Bird (Root Theatre and Echo); Blister (Paines Pough/Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama); Open Heart Surgery (Theatre Uncut); Come to Where I’m From (Paines Plough); Some Machine (Paines Plough/Rose Bruford); The Island (Nottingham Playhouse/Det Norske Oslo); Us Like Gods (Hampstead, Heat and Light); Gypsy Girl (Paines Plough Later at Soho) and Wasteland (New Perspectives/Derby Theatre; shortlisted for the Brian Way Award). Radio plays include My Boy (BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play; Bronze SONY Award for best radio drama) and Lucy Island (BBC Radio 3). Her screen work includes Rough Skin (Touchpaper/Channel 4; shortlisted for Best British Short at British Independent Film Awards and Raindance Film Festival). She has also written two episodes of Glue (E4/Eleven Films), and has been commissioned by BBC Radio 4, Manchester Royal Exchange, and jointly by Clean Break and Birmingham Rep. She was a MacDowell Colony Fellow 2013, and a Yaddo Fellow 2014.

Book preview