Identifying a new play
Wed 27 Sep 2017What if you woke up one day and discovered you’d turned into someone else? That you weren’t you any more? That’s what happens to Annie, the heroine of our new Made By The Marlowe production, Kanye The First, which will play in our Studio in October.
It’s fair to say that Annie’s life isn’t going well. She’s caring for her sick mother, and she keeps mistaking hot men for her dad – and she has a perfect, pretty sister who sails through life. But then one day, she wakes up and discovers she has been transformed into international hip-hop star Kanye West…
This is the starting point for this funny and original play, which was developed through our Roar programme for new writing. Roar helps writers develop plays they’re working on, through mentoring, directorial support and allowing them to work with actors, so they can hear their words being spoken. In particular, we focus on plays that have an original voice and a real contemporary relevance.
Other plays developed through Roar so far have included Run The Beast Down by Titas Halder, which was performed in The Studio in January starring Ben Aldridge. The play has now earned Titas a nomination as Best Writer in The Stage Debut Awards for 2017. Another Roar play was Anders Lustgarten’s A Secret Theatre, which will be performed at the Globe this winter.
Kanye The First was was written by Sam Steiner, who’s currently a playwriting fellow at Paines Plough, the theatre company dedicated to new writing. His first play Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons has just completed its second sell-out run at the Edinburgh Fringe, and will be touring this autumn.
Kanye The First is being produced by HighTide and Paul Jellis in association with us and The North Wall. It premiered at the High Tide Festival, which is held in Aldeburgh and London, before transferring to us. Time Out described it as an: “an audacious and amusing play about identity and cultural appropriation,” written by “a very clever young man.”
Kanye The First: Wednesday 11 to Saturday 14 October