Finding Home – A Q&A with the writers

Finding Home marks the 50th anniversary of the Ugandan Asian exodus. In August 1972, Ugandan President Idi Amin ordered the country’s Indian and Pakistani communities to leave within 90 days. Many of the displaced were British citizens and, as a result, around 27,000 people emigrated to the UK, with thousands settling in Leicester.  Finding Home features three new …

Hanif Kureishi’s film My Beautiful Laundrette to be made into play

Curve, Belgrade Theatre Coventry, Everyman Theatre Cheltenham and Leeds Playhouse are joining forces to co-produce a new stage production of Hanif Kureishi’s screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette. This bold new production of Hanif Kureishi‘s ground-breaking 1985 Oscar-nominated film of the same name will be directed by Curve’s Artistic Director Nikolai Foster (Memoirs of an Asian Football Casual and Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw, both at …

Iman Qureshi wins 2018 Papatango New Writing Prize

Iman Qureshi has won the 2018 Papatango New Writing Prize for her play, The Funeral Director. The Funeral Director was chosen from 1384 entries to the competition, and explores the life of a gay Muslim woman who runs a funeral parlour and is ‘an incisive and heartfelt’ story of sexuality, gender and religion in 21st-century …

Kali launches ‘Discovery programme’ across the regions

Kali Theatre and Curve has launched a new initiative to search for South Asian women writers across 3 UK cities. Its mission is to discover, support and nurture the next generation of aspiring female playwrights – who currently are hugely underrepresented – and bring their rich, diverse voices and experiences to the stage. The programme, …

Applications open for Belgrade’s playwriting workshops

Applications are now open to join a free playwriting programme running this autumn. Critical Mass, at the Belgrade Theatre, is for writers aged 18+ from Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic and Refugee backgrounds. The programme is in partnership with with Euphoric Ink and in association with Tamasha Theatre Company and will run from September to December 2018 for one evening a week. …

New prize invites scripts

The Lancaster Playwriting Prize is a new partnership initiative between Lancaster University and The Dukes Theatre, Lancaster; it is supported by Lucy Briers, Tamasha Theatre Company and Arts Council England. In this inaugural year, the Prize is focused on BAMER (Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic and Refugee) playwrights. The aim is not just to discover new …

Bally Gill

Coventry born, Bally Gill is currently playing the lead role of Romeo in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Romeo and Juliet. Directed by Erica Whyman, Shakespeare’s tragic love story is set in a world very much like our own and is about a generation of young people born into violence and ripped apart by …

Rabiah Hussain

Tell me more about your play and the themes you explore. I wrote Where I Live And What I Live For as part of a two-year project at Theatre Absolute called Are We Where We Are? The project asks for a response to the quote from American novelist Henry David Thoreau, “We are not where …

Hijabi Monologues

Hijabi Monologues started life more than a decade ago when university friends Sahar Ullah, Dan Morrison and Zeenat Rahman were socialising following a concert they had organised. Morrison made a quip that he wouldn’t have otherwise chosen to be friends with women who wear a hijab. Ullah told him a story about going to a …

North Country

A new play exploring cultural identity through the lens of a post-apocalyptic world opens at Freedom Studios next week. Tajinder Singh Hayer’s latest work, North Country follows the journey of three young people as they deal with the aftermath of a bloody plague. As the trio embark on rebuilding their lives over a forty year …