Christine Rose, Playwright
I came to playwriting late, and fast. Six plays in fourteen months — not because I had a plan, but because I had things I couldn’t stop saying.
I write about women in extremis. Women navigating systems — political, social, romantic — that were not designed with them in mind, and often actively work against them. I write about the moment before the breaking point, and sometimes the moment after. I write about survival, and about the quieter, less celebrated courage it takes to simply keep going when the world has made it very clear it isn’t paying attention.
Survival is not a new theme for me. My memoir, One Reason to Live, explored it from the inside — raw, personal, unflinching. Playwriting has given me a new way to examine the same territory: through character, through comedy, through the distance that fiction allows and the truth it reveals anyway.
Sanctuary, my debut play, was a dark political thriller set against an American civil war — two women, a basement, and the question of whether friendship can survive ideology when the stakes are life and death. It premiered at The Hope Theatre in November 2024.
10 First Dates is something different on the surface — a comedy, sharp and funny and deeply recognizable — but underneath it’s asking the same questions. What does it cost a woman to start over at 50? What does it mean to be seen, really seen, when the world has spent decades teaching you your value is tied to someone else? Maggie’s ten dates are funny because they’re true. They’re true because they happened — to me, to my friends, to women everywhere who are quietly navigating an exhausting and often unsafe landscape while trying to hold onto themselves.
I am an American writer working largely in the British fringe, which perhaps gives me a particular vantage point — close enough to feel it, far enough to see it whole. My work is rooted in specificity and driven by empathy. I am interested in women who are flawed and furious and funny and surviving. I am interested in the stories we don’t tell in polite company.
Christine Rose 