A play about resistance and dignity in the face of global exploitation. Winner of Theatre Uncut's Political Playwriting Award.
Zoe Cooper Books
Six short plays exploring estrangement and loneliness, moving towards redemption and hope. First performed and livestreamed from the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, in 2021.
Seventeen-year-old Asha is an emphatic rebel, unafraid of pointing out the hypocrisy around her but less sure how to actually dismantle it. Her younger sister, Bettina, wide-eyed and naïve, is just trying to get through the school day without getting her pocket money nicked. Between essays, homework and bus journeys home the two sisters meet outside the school gates each afternoon, smarting at the injustice of the world around them. Bouncing with wit, Sonali Bhattacharyya’s mesmerizing play Two Billion Beats is an insightful, moving and tremendously funny coming-of-age story about the unfairness of growing up in a world where you don't make the rules. It premiered at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, in February 2022. An earlier version of the play was performed as part of the Orange Tree's Inside/Outside season, livestreamed in 2021.
Jane Austen's brilliant satire of the gothic novel. “If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.” The most sprightly and satirical of Austen’s novels, Northanger Abbey was written when the author was herself in her early twenties, and takes for its heroine seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland, a spirited young woman preoccupied with the pleasures of dressing, dancing, and reading sensational novels. When she visits Northanger Abbey, the ancestral home of handsome Henry Tilney, Catherine’s taste in books comes back to haunt her. The rambling house, full of locked doors, and the family’s mysterious history give rise to delightfully dreadful suspicions, and finally only Catherine’s sweet nature and good humor triumph over her susceptibility. A sly commentary on the power of literature as well as a cautionary tale about the perils of naïveté, Northanger Abbey is a fresh and funny tale of one young woman receiving, as Margaret Drabble reveals in her illuminating introduction, “intensive instruction in the ways of the world.” With an Introduction by Margaret Drabble and an Afterword by Stephanie Laurens
A riotous stage comedy about sisterhood, freedom of speech, and dissent in the face of institutionalised Islamophobia.
Cecil Rice - Venice, Sunlight and Water is to be published as a prelude to a travelling exhibition of Cecil Rice's original work and silkscreen prints around the UK in the Summer of 2006 through to the end of the year.
