Hajja Souad, an 80-year old Palestinian woman living on the besieged Gaza Strip, knows about business. She has survived decades of wars and oppression through making shrouds for the dead. A compelling black comedy that delves deep into the intimate life of ordinary Palestinians to weave a highly distinctive path through Palestine's turbulent past and present, The Shroud Maker is a one-woman comedy that weaves comic fantasy and satire with true stories told first hand to the writer, and offers a...
Finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize 2024 Congratulations! Your pain is commercially viable. It’s 1991 and the Gulf War rages three thousand, three hundred and twenty miles away. Darlee is 8 years old, crying behind the wheelie bookcase in Miss Stratford’s classroom. She’s just realised she’s Iraqi. Or half. Maybe both. She saw it on the news last night after Neighbours and fish fingers. Heard the fear slipping through the receiver, saw it oozing from Dad’s eyeballs and into the livi...
"Naomi Wallace commits the unpardonable sin of being partisan, and, the darkness and harshness of her work notwithstanding, outrageously optimistic. She seems to believe the world can change. She certainly writes as if she intends to set it on fire."-Tony Kushner Naomi Wallace, the rare writer who combines lyrical theatricality with political ferocity, turns her sight to the Middle East, with a new triptych for the stage. Vision One, A State of Innocence, is set-as the playwright describes, in...
You haven't asked, but yes, you both may stay in our house for the time being. And use our things. I figure it'll take a war to settle it all.A compelling story of two families - one Palestinian, one Israeli - forced by history into an intimacy they didn't choose.'[Returning to Haifa] offers a moving confrontation between two sets of displaced people and an utterly unsentimental exploration of the complexities of home, history and parenthood . . . its call for reciprocal awareness and acknowledg...
Shakespeare's Play of the Merchant of Venice Arranged for Representation at the
by Charles John Kean
Four plays based on the Oedipus legend by four leading dramatists of the Arab World.
Theater, Morality and Enlightenment (Theater, Morality and Enlightenment)
by Fereshteh Kowssar
In Ancient Sumeria, a woman’s desire for sexual sovereignty and radical vision of civic plurality draws the anger and outrage of the male status quo and unleashes catastrophe onto her city and her body. The seminal Lamentation for the Destruction of the City of Ur is the first poem written for a civic entity -- a city -- in the history of mankind. Writing scenes across multiple timelines that stretch from 2000 BC, to the European Imperialist fantasies of the late 19th Century, to the ISIS destr...
It's Not Your Fault
by Jillian Campana, Dina Amin, and The Cairo Writers Lab