PLAYSCRIPTS
Image credit: Vega Scene
Poldi Mohammed
PREMIERED: January 2021 – without audience due to Covid restrictions.
CONTEXT: Urban documentary theatre Vega Scene commissioned this short play to be part of their ‘Vi Er Hausmannsgate’ (We are Hausmanns Gate) series – where playwrights were asked to write to themes around the local area and its history.
SYNOPSIS: The piece explores the time-bends of a city pavement. In this instance the nexus between two Jewish brothers living in Hausmanns Gate in 1940 unaware that they are about to be deported to Auschwitz – and the Palestinian refugees who were given sanctuary in Jakob’s Church, on the same street, 75 years later. Available in English and Norwegian
Photo: Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty
Points Of Pain
PREMIERED: Redzone Free The Arts Festival – Beirut/Cairo 2014
CONTEXT: The play was a poetic and structured response to the terrorist attacks perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway in 2011. Breivik was represented on stage as a grotesque puppet. The play performed as part of the Freedom Of Expression Festival in Beirut and Cairo in 2014. In English.
EXTRACT: The following extract indicates where local censors in Beirut and Cairo required cuts in the text.
Soft Eyes / Myke Øyne
PREMIERED: 2015
CONTEXT: The play was originally written as part of the Con Testo festival (Oslo Academy of arts / Norwegian Centre for New playwriting). The festival puts a playwright, a director and four actors together and they are tasked to create a performance within 48 hours, based on a newspaper headline form the previous week, which they are allocated at random. In this instance the headline was “78 døde i en lastebil” (“78 dead in a trailer”) with a report on the illegally smuggled Syrian refugees who had been found suffocated in a truck in Austria. The play was successful and was subsequently restaged by Artilleriet Theatre – in a trailer identical to that in the news report. To date the immersive play has performed to over 5000 youth in high schools around Norway and is still in repertoire. Available in English and Norwegian
Additional: Academic analysis of the play’s impact in the academic quarterly “Kunst Og Konflikt (Art and Conflict)” Pp.53-68 (In Norwegian)