It's the hot, humid, sticky summer of 1977. At a popular birdwatching spot jutting out into the North Sea at the mouth of the Tees, Martin, Jack, Michael and Carol are staring out into the future, their lives intertwined.

A friendship, a marriage, a holiday, and a death - the gatherings and departures that make us human. Robert Holman's richly resonant play is an uplifting portrait of human hope and vulnerability.

German Skerries was first performed at the Bush Theatre, London, and won the George Devine Award in the year that it is set. It was revived in 2016 at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, in a co-production with the award-winning Up in Arms Theatre Company, followed by a tour around the UK.

Robert Holman's plays include German Skerries (Bush Theatre, 1977); Other Worlds (Royal Court Theatre, 1980); Today (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1984); The Overgrown Path (Royal Court Theatre, 1985); Making Noise Quietly (Bush Theatre, 1987); Across Oka (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1988); Rafts and Dreams (Royal Court Theatre, 1990); Bad Weather (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1998); Holes in the Skin (Chichester Festival Theatre, 2003); Jonah and Otto (Royal Exchange Theatre, 2008); A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky, co-written with David Eldridge and Simon Stephens (Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, 2010); and A Breakfast of Eels (Print Room at the Coronet, 2015).

His play Making Noise Quietly was revived at the Donmar Warehouse in 2012, and Jonah and Otto at the Park Theatre in 2014.

He has also written a novel, The Amish Landscape.