Port

The Stage“Port is a contemporary classic...” Certainly, Stephens writes with great control and while the text may be spattered with terrors, it also has its passages of great beauty and perception. If the main characters are full of a sense of loss, they are also resilient...

Time Out“It captures the grey gravity of urban British adolescence...” The scale of Elliott's production bothered me... O'Flynn's performance is riveting, but after a while it begins to feel too big, the naturalistic prose over-amped and over-enunciated in the vast Lyttelton...

Whatsonstage.com“Racheal is played with exceptional guts and savvy by Kate O'Flynn...” Stephens has always understood that theatre is a journey (albeit, circular): for the characters, the audience and the narrative. This insight, with his richly poetic vein of writing and reference, is what makes him so potent...

The Arts Desk“This is a gruelling and sad evening...” Stephens’s style mixes a cool British noir sensibility with a redemptive humanism. His writing is always exact, and he writes lyrically about hope, honesty and humour, as well as brutality and despair...

Evening Standard“I suspect it would be more compelling in a smaller space...” It isn’t as rebellious as his more recent work but it’s gritty, grubby and honest. And if its episodic form feels jagged, there’s no denying Stephens’s elegant command of rhythm and motifs...

The Telegraph“The play’s failings are glaring...” That said, I’d happily walk to Stockport and back if that was the only means of catching Kate O’Flynn’s mesmerising central performance as Racheal. She graces even the most prosaic, job-lot batches of dialogue with a quicksilver alertness...

Guardian“Marianne Elliott's production is flawless...” Not the least of the play's achievements is that it provides a gorgeous central role, which the relatively unknown Kate O'Flynn plays with breathtaking assurance...