Lolita Chakrabarti

A.R.T.: Debut. Lolita Chakrabarti OBE is an actress and an award-winning playwright. Her debut play Red Velvet opened at the Tricycle Theatre, London, before transferring to St Ann’s Warehouse in New York and then to London’s West End as part of Sir Kenneth Branagh’s inaugural season at The Garrick Theatre. It earned her the Evening Standard Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright 2012; The Critics’ Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright 2013; AWA for Arts and Culture 2013 and an Olivier Award nomination for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre 2012, as well as many other nominations. Red Velvet is now on the Drama syllabus for A level, is studied at universities in the UK and USA, and there have been over twenty professional productions in the USA and beyond, including at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington in June 2022. In 2019 Lolita adapted the Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi for the stage (Sheffield Theatres and Wyndham’s Theatre in London’s West End), for which she won the award for Best New Play at the Olivier Awards 2022, UK Theatre Awards 2019 and WhatsonStage Awards 2019. Other writing credits include Hymn, Almeida Theatre/Sky Arts; an adaptation of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Manchester International Festival and Brisbane Festival; Stones of Venice, a VR film for New Vision Arts Festival in Hong Kong; she curated The Greatest Wealth (The Old Vic) celebrating eight decades of the NHS, which was also shown online during the pandemic; she was dramaturg on Message in a Bottle, ZooNation/Sadler’s Wells. Lolita has adapted Maggie O’Farrell’s award winning novel Hamnet for the stage for the Royal Shakespeare Company and Neal Street Productions which will open in Stratord-Upon-Avon next spring. She is also dramaturg on the forthcoming Sylvia for the Old Vic. Acting credits include: Fanny and Alexander, The Old Vic; Hamlet, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art; “Vigil,” “Showtrial,” “The Casual Vacancy,” BBC; “Wheel of Time,” Amazon Prime; “Born to Kill,” Channel 4; “My Mad Fat Diary” (E4), “Beowulf; Return to the Shieldlands,” ITV; “Riviera,” Sky; “Criminal, Netflix.