Graeae Plays 1: New Plays Redefining Disability

A unique, groundbreaking collection of six new plays that redefine disability selected and introduced by Dame Jenny Sealey.

Includes the Playtexts:

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL BY RAY HARRISON GRAHAM

PEELING BY KAITE O'REILLY

SOFT VENGEANCE BY APRIL DE ANGELIS

FITTINGS: THE LAST FREAKSHOW BY MIKE KENNY

INTO THE MYSTIC BY PETER WOLF

HOUND BY MARIA OSHODI

April De Angelis's plays include Jumpy (Royal Court and West End), Wild East (Royal Court), A Laughing Matter (Out of Joint/NT/tour), The Warwickshire Testimony (RSC), The Positive Hour (Out of Joint/Hampstead/Old Vic; Sphinx), Headstrong (NT Shell Connections), Playhouse Creatures (Sphinx Theatre Company), Hush (Royal Court), Soft Vengeance (Graeae Theatre Company), Amongst Friends (Hampstead), The Life and Times of Fanny Hill (adapted from the James Cleland novel), Ironmistress (ReSisters Theatre Company), Crux (Aurora Metro Books) and Wuthering Heights (adapted from Emily Brontë's novel for Birmingham Rep). Her work for BBC Radio includes Visitants, The Outlander, which won the Writers' Guild Award 1992, and Cash Cows for the Woman's Hour serial. For opera: Flight with composer Jonathan Dove (Glyndebourne), and the libretto for Silent Twins (Almeida).

Mike Kenny (born in the Welsh borders, with a Welsh mother) is one of England's leading writers specialising in young people's theatre. He was included in the Independent on Sunday's list of Top Ten Living Playwrights and his plays are performed regularly throughout the UK and all over the world. In 2000, he was Arts Council England's first recipient of The Children's Award for Playwriting for Children and Young People. His Olivier Award-winning adaptation of The Railway Children for York Theatre Royal, has had several successful revivals at Waterloo and Kings Cross stations, as well as at the National Railway Museum. The first production, directed by Damian Cruden, starred Sarah Quintrell, Colin Tarrant, Marshall Lancaster, Elizabeth Keates, Marcus Brigstocke and featured a working Stirling Single (GNR 4-2-2 No.1) steam locomotive on a real rail track. In Canada, it won the People's Choice Award following its record-breaking run in Toronto. Mike also won the 2015 Writers Guild Award for Best Play for Younger Audiences with Three Wise Monkeys and the Deutscher Kindertheaterpreis in 2012 with Electric Darkness. In July 2013, Mike was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of Nottingham for his work in theatre for young people. He is married to actress Barbara Marten, they have three sons, Theo, Josh and Billy. She met him in the 1980s, while acting in a student pantomime in Birmingham, when they were studying to become a teachers.

Kaite O'Reilly is a playwright, radio dramatist, writer, and dramaturg who works in disability arts and culture and mainstream culture. She has won many awards for her work, including the Peggy Ramsay Award for YARD (The Bush, London), Manchester Theatre Awards best play of the year for Perfect (Contact Theatre), Theatre-Wales Award for peeling (Graeae Theatre company) and the Ted Hughes Award for new works in Poetry for her reworking of Aeschylus's Persians for National Theatre Wales in their inaugural year. Persians is published by Fair Acre Press in 2019. She was a finalist in the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for her play about memory and brain injury The Almond and the Seahorse and honoured in the 2018 Elliot Hayes for Outstanding Achievement in Dramaturgy for And Suddenly I Disappear: The Singapore/UK 'd' Monologues. Widely published and produced, she works internationally, with plays translated/produced in eleven countries worldwide. Productions in 2019 include peeling, by Taking Flight Theatre, Aesop's Fables with Unicorn, the Costa Rican premiere of the 9 fridas and a reworking of Orestes in Singapore with Phillip Zarrilli. The Almond and the Seahorse, adapted fore the screen with Celyn Jones, is in development with Mad as Birds Films. 2016 productions included Cosy at Wales Millennium Centre (The Llanarth Group), The Almond and the Seahorse in Estonia and Germany, and the Taiwanese production of the 9 Fridas in Mandarin transferring to Hong Kong Repertory Theatre. These plays are collected in her critically acclaimed Atypical Plays for Atypical Actors, published by Oberon in 2016. Her Unlimited International Commission And Suddenly I Disappear premiered in Singapore in 2018 (Access Path Productions/The Llanarth Group) and then transferred to London's Southbank as part of the Unlimited Festival. This text, along with a Crip' feminist reworking of Richard III -richard iii redux - co-written and directed by Phillip Zarrilli, is published in The 'd' Monologues (Oberon, 2018). A leading figure in disability arts and culture in the UK, she received two Cultural Olympiad Commissions for In Water I'm Weightless, produced by National Theatre Wales/Southbank Centre as part of the official festival celebrating the 2012 London Olympics/Paralympics. She has received bursaries from Literature Wales and two prestigious Creative Wales Major Awards from Arts Council Wales. In 2003-06 she was AHRC Creative Fellow at Exeter University, developing 'Alternative dramaturgies Informed by a Deaf and disability Perspective.' This work has continued as fellow of international research centre 'Interweaving Performance Cultures' at Freie Universitat in Berlin (2010-17), where she reflected on her practice between hearing culture and Deaf culture, disability culture and 'mainstream' culture, with four essays forthcoming in books by Routledge. She edited FACE ON: Disability Arts in Ireland and Beyond for Arts Disability Ireland and Shelf Life, an anthology of writing by those with reduced life expectancy for National Disability Arts Forum. She is the patron of DaDa (Disability arts Deaf arts). Dramaturg for The Llanarth Group, she co-creates work internationally with renowned theatre director Phillip Zarrilli.