Mr James Kenworth

Dr James Kenworth is a Playwright/Scriptwriter and Academic/Senior Lecturer in Media Narrative at Middlesex University, London. His plays includes ‘verse-prose’ plays Johnny Song, Gob; the black comedy Polar Bears; issue-led/based plays Everybody’s World (Elder Abuse), Dementia’s Journey (Dementia); plays for young people/schools, The Last Story in the World; and a Newham-based quintet of site-specific/responsive plays: When Chaplin Met Gandhi, Revolution Farm, A Splotch of Red: Keir Hardie in West Ham and Alice in Canning Town; Elizabeth Fry: The Angel of Prisons. His research interests include biographical and historical drama, localized adaptations of literary classics, site-specific and non-traditional/outsider improvised performance space.

He joined Middlesex University in 2017 and has taught at Foundation Year, undergraduate and postgraduate level on Film, Creative Writing, Drama, Journalism, English and Games Design degrees. Prior to joining MDX, he was Course Tutor in Creative Writing and Literature for Adult Learning Organisations, including Workers Educational Association, Working Men’s College and Newham Adult Learning Service. At Newham, he successfully introduced new courses in Creative Writing and World Literature, at beginner, intermediate and advanced level, into the curriculum/programme, and designed and planned all course content.

His debut play, Gob, in 1999, starred former Take That star, Jason Orange, and was Time Out and What’s On Critics Choice at King’s Head Theatre, Islington. In a radical and subversive departure from his boyband image Orange played a 'homeless techno revolutionary in crustie combats and a grubby Che Guevara T-shirt'. Its revival at Edinburgh Fringe Festival earned the distinction of two five-star reviews from Three Weeks and The List, and was included in the feature "Editor's Highlights of the Fringe". 

James was one of eight playwrights selected to take part in the inaugural Tamasha/Mulberry School Writers Attachment Scheme in 2011, created and taught by playwright and Tamasha Theatre Company co-Artistic Director and Playwright, Fin Kennedy. The scheme has since become Schoolwrights, the UK's first playwrights-in-schools training scheme, which uses Mulberry School as a training base for other writers. As part of the Attachment Scheme, his play, The Last Story in the World, was performed by Mulberry Students, supported by professional actors, as a script-in-hand rehearsed reading, on a 'scratch performance' at Soho Theatre.

In 2014, James received special permission from the George Orwell Estate to write a contemporary re-imagining of Animal Farm, retitled Revolution Farm, performed on an inner city farm in East London, which the Independent’s Paul Taylor described as a ‘terrifically powerful update…highly recommended” and British Theatre Guide wrote ”If Animal Farm is on the curriculum this term, what better way to introduce it?

His raising awareness play, Dementia’s Journey, won the 2015 University of Stirling International Dementia Award in the category: Dementia & the Arts. 

When Chaplin Met Gandhi is published by small publishing house TSL Publications. A Splotch of Red is published by New Internationalist’s Workable, a new publishing imprint dedicated to trade unions and organized workers. Revolution Farm and Alice in Canning Town is published by independent UK publishing house playdeadpress.

The Newham Plays have been filmed, edited and produced by Middlesex University’s Media Department’s BA Film students and can be viewed on Vimeo. (upon request).

His most recent play, Elizabeth Fry: The Angel of Prisons, the fifth in the Newham Play series, performed at Canning Town Library in 2022, , garned impressive critical acclaim, with the Evening Standard writing, a “Hyper-local history play about penal reformer Elizabeth Fry has heart.", and The Spectator,  "The script blends present-day London vernacular with the dialect of the early 19th century. It’s easy to watch and it delivers heaps of information without any hint of lecture-hall formality." 

James’s pioneering of a Pro-Localist methodology of theatre making in non-traditional spaces, featuring a hybrid of professional artists with local talent, was highlighted and championed in a review by London Theatre Reviews; “Kenworth’s production is an inspiration for theatre makers across London. The ‘Pro – localist’ ethos, combined with facilitating a local community space, could be the answer to countless fringe and off-west end theatres having to close their doors across London.” 

His plays have been reviewed in The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, The Spectator, Evening Standard, British Theatre Guide, Eastern Eye, Morning Star.