Mark Ravenhill is one of the most distinctive contemporary UK playwrights. He burst on to the theatre scene in 1996 with the huge hit Shopping and Fucking. He has continued to garner critical acclaim for plays that include Some Explicit Polaroids, Mother Clap's Molly House, Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat, The Cut, Product, pool (no water), Citizenship, Ten Plagues, The Coronation of Poppea, Candide, Faust is Dead, Handbag, A Life in Three Acts, A Life of Galileo and Over There.

It's summer. I'm in a supermarket. It's hot and I'm sweaty. Damp. And I'm watching this couple shopping. I'm watching you. And you're both smiling. You see me and you know sort of straight away that I'm going to have you.
With a raw mixture of black humour and bleak philosophy, the play follows three disconnected young adults whose lives have been reduced to a series of transactions in an emotionally shrink-wrapped world. A place where shopping is sexy and fucking is a job.
Ravenhill's play is a prophetic vision of our twenty-first century world. It received its world premiere in 1996 in a production by Out of Joint and the Royal Court Theatre, and has been published in this edition to coincide with the 2016 revival of the play at the Lyric Hammersmith, London.