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Dateline: 9th September, 2005
Kerry Michael celebrates his first anniversary as artistic director of Theatre Royal Stratford East with an exciting line up of shows for the new season.
Highlights of the season will include the return of Bashment, hard-hitting, tender, painfully funny, and highly-topical play that uses the anti-gay lyrics of dancehall music as a starting point to explore such issues as racism, identity and victimisation. This will be followed by an exciting new play called Gladiator Games, a dramatisation of the Zahid Mubarek case, about a young man killed in the Feltham Young Offenders Institute.
Written and directed by Rikki Beadle-Blair, Bashment returns to the stage in October after a four-week run earlier this year.
"We are bringing back Bashment because we believe it is a very important and highly original play that needs to be seen by as many people as possible," Michael explains. "You can't fail to be moved by it. It tackles difficult issues head-on with understanding and insight, yet also manages to be extremely entertaining and ultimately positive and uplifting."
Then, in November, it will be the turn of Gladiator Games, by Tanika Gupta, which features the music of Nitin Sawhney. A joint production with Sheffield Theatres, Gladiator Games traces the Mubarek family's pursuit of the truth behind the death of Zahid, a young British Asian man who was attacked by his cellmate and later died of his injuries.
The play is based upon interviews and accounts given to the Feltham Inquiry, and asks why, on the eve of his release, Zahid was placed in a cell with a known racist. A discussion and debate will follow every evening performance, with the panel featuring key personnel involved with the inquiry.
There will also be an Open House on September 17-18, when members of the public will be invited to tour the Theatre Royal and see the architecture of the 19th century.
This year's Christmas show will be Pinocchio, the cautionary tale of a small boy with a big nose. With a lively script written by Trish Cooke, Pinocchio also boasts an original score by Robert Hyman, who wrote the music for Red Riding Hood, the 2003 panto, and was the musical director in another huge Theatre Royal hit, The Big Life. Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
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