In the first ‘traditional’ version of The Stage 100 since pre covid, playwright and actress Lolita Chakrabarti has been named in the top 10 Independent Creatives 2023.
The coveted list returns in a slightly altered format, with the top 20 numbered, but the remaining 80 grouped in their field, including actors, regional theatres and rising stars, to name a few.
Lolita, who received an OBE in 2021 for services to the arts, scooped Best Play for Life of Pi at the Olivier Awards last year, one of five awards for the play that evening. An instant hit, it has confirmed a UK tour for later in 2023, opened in the US at the American Repertory Theater’s Loeb Drama Center, and will move to Broadway in March.
Previous credits include Red Velvet, which opened in both London and New York and was nominated for nine major awards, for which Lolita won the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright, The Critics Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright and the AWA Award for Arts and Culture. In 2019 she adapted the ambitious Invisible Cities, which premiered at the Manchester International Festival and went on to the Brisbane Festival.
Hymn, a play by Lolita about male love, that is neither physical nor romantic, starring Danny Sapani and Adrian Lester, streamed live from The Almeida and was broadcast on Sky Arts, during the coronavirus pandemic, to huge critical acclaim. It opened to audiences at The Almeida in July 2021.
Lolita curated The Greatest Wealth at the Old Vic in London in 2018, commissioning eight monologues of which she wrote one, about the NHS on its 70th birthday. Directed by Adrian Lester, it was a fitting tribute to an incredible history and starred Jade Anouka, Louise English, Dervla Kirwan, Ruth Madeley, Art Malik, Meera Syal, Sophie Stone and David Threlfall. The series was updated in July 2020, in the mist of the coronavirus, with a monologue written by Bernardine Evaristo and performed by Sharon D Clarke.
Chakrabarti’s next project is the highly anticipated stage adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet for the Royal Shakespeare Company, which will open in April 2023.