[12] In August 2007, Kemp and Lucy Maycock co-directed Mr. Vertigo, a project based on the novel by Paul Auster, for the first summer residency at the North Wall Arts Centre in Oxford.
[14] Kemp himself directed a revival by Swine Palace at the Claude L. Shaver Theatre, Louisiana State University in September 1998.
[16][17] Kemp's play 5/11 premiered at the Chichester Festival Theatre in August 2005, featuring Alistair McGowan as King James, to mark the 400th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605.
[18][19] Addressing home-grown religious terrorism in the years after the September 11 attacks and soon after the 2005 London bombings,[20] the play was considered "blazingly topical" by Telegraph reviewer Dominic Cavendish.
[9] In 2011, to mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Version in 1611, Kemp edited 12 extracts of approximately 80 minutes' duration – six each from the Old and New Testaments – which were staged at the National Theatre.
[21] For Théâtre Sans Frontières, a theatre company that stages accessible adaptations of foreign-language works in the original language, Kemp has dramatised – largely in French – Candide (1993),[22] La Tulipe noire (1995), Le Mariage de Figaro (1997)[23] and Les Trois Mousquetaires (1999),[24] and has written a dramatisation in English and French of A Tale of Two Cities (1998).
[30] Kemp's translation of Jean Racine's tragedy Andromache, which preserves the French form (rhyming couplets of 12-syllable lines), was first staged at RADA in May to June 2015.
The premiere at Bridgewater Hall during the 2007 Manchester International Festival was narrated by Alan Rickman, conducted by Mark Elder, and featured a film component by Mike Figgis.