The award-winning play that follows one man's desperate attempts to buck the system, and asks what really makes us who we are in the 21st century.
When a young executive reaches breaking point and decides to disappear, he pays a visit to a master of the craft in the form of a seafront fortune teller in Southend. Haunted by visitations from a pathologist who swears he is already lying flat out on her slab, he begins a nightmarish journey to the edge of existence that sees him stripped of everything that made him who he was.
Fin Kennedy's play How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found won the 2005 Arts Council’s John Whiting Award and was subsequently staged at the Crucible Studio, Sheffield, in March 2007.
About the author
Fin Kennedy is an award-winning playwright of theatre and radio whose plays are regularly produced in the UK and abroad. In 2021 he set up Applied Stories, a digital production company making audio drama and online training.
His first play Protection was produced at Soho Theatre in 2003, where he was also Pearson writer-in-residence. His second play How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found won the 38th Arts Council John Whiting Award and has been produced around the world. It has become a firm favourite with student and amateur performance groups and is among Nick Hern Books' most licensed plays.
Fin has 20 years' experience writing for teenagers, often through a process of being embedded in an inner-city school or youth theatre.
His first two plays for teenagers, Locked In (2006) and We Are Shadows (2008) were produced by Half Moon Young People's Theatre and toured nationally. Life Raft (2015) for Bristol Old Vic Young Company, has been translated into German and French for use in schools across Europe.
From 2006-2014 Fin was writer-in-residence at Mulberry School for Girls in east London, for whom he has written seven plays, published in two volumes by Nick Hern Books as The Urban Girl's Guide to Camping and other plays and The Domino Effect and other plays for teenagers.
Fin also writes for radio and has had ten Afternoon Plays broadcast on BBC Radio 4 including The Good Listener, a returning series set inside GCHQ and On Kosovo Field, a collaboration with musician PJ Harvey.
Fin's most recent venture is the UK's first fully online Playwrighting for Teachers course, to pass on many of the original creative writing exercises he has devised over the years.