Lola Annesley

Lola is a playwright from South London whose work combines abstract ideas with comedic realism to explore questions about loneliness, human connection, and the desire for love. Her work centres on the female experience, bringing the humanness of rage, darkness, desire and comedy to voice her characters and put them at the centre of their own stories. 

In 2023 Lola took her play Ophelia to Edinburgh Fringe: a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet from Ophelia’s perspective, exploring female coming-of-age, the silencing of women’s anger and the deletion of female characters from the canon. She has since written a short screenplay telling the story of three women waiting in an abortion clinic, and a dark comedy about the breakdown of a relationship following a proposal.

Since starting the MA in Drama Writing, Lola has experimented with storytelling modes, combining her love for naturalistic dialogue with expressionistic worlds and forms. Psychoanalytic theory has influenced a lot of her work, allowing her to access characters’ multifaceted layers through intimate, poetic monologue. She has recently become interested in clowning practice as a form of expression within her own writing and in I Think I Am Going To Die (oh well), using this to explore the search for vulnerability through play.