Author: Katherine Atkinson

Kirsty is a sixteen-year-old girl growing up in 00s Brentwood. She likes WKD, Elton John, Pie and Mash and Charlie Red body spray. She’s on a quest to win Sexy Ricky’s heart and pass her GCSEs. She also has a secret to tell you. One she can’t tell anyone else. Follow Kirsty’s story through the house parties and Irish pubs of Essex. From West Ham matches to choir practice, pre-drinks to registration, she will tell you what it’s really like to be an Essex Girl.

Essex Girl is the second show from award-winning theatre maker and real-life Essex Girl, Maria Ferguson (Fat Girls Don’t Dance). This show is a monologue about growing up surrounded by expectation, of inappropriate relationships, female friendship, secrets, desires and alcopops. It questions how the Essex Girl stereotype influences young girls, what they want, what they think they deserve, and how they are treated. Wonderfully funny and ultimately hard-hitting it will resonate with a wide audience, particularly millenials, or anyone who has got too drunk at a house party.

“My voice cracked on the high note. I saw my Nan wince. The blood rushed to my cheeks – and a century’s lineage lay shattered on the floor.”

In this affectionate tribute Hannah Maxwell makes a prodigal’s return to the musty vibrancy of amateur dramatics – her family’s consuming passion for 89 years and four generations.

Weaving storytelling, stand-up, live art and a manageable amount of musical theatre references, I, AmDram traces the distance between queer, quirky London and the rehearsal halls of Home Counties suburbia; minding the gap between the identities we assert and the worlds we leave.

Stand-up poet Laurie Bolger brings you a charming, chatty and witty new show about the impact of strangers. Through storytelling, poetry and song she asks: how does that annoying passenger on the bus turn out to be the stranger that saves the day? Talking to Strangers is a delightful celebration of random encounters and how we are all strangers – until we’re not!

Laurie was recently appointed lead facilitator for BBC 1Xtra’s Words First London and shortlisted for Young Poet Laureate for London. She has performed at venues such as The Royal Albert Hall, Old Vic Theatre and 02 Arena as well as being Poet in Residence in schools libraries and Queen Elizabeth’s Olympic Park. Laurie currently hosts BANG Said the Gun London’s leading stand-up poetry night and multi award winning poetry podcast Round @ Laurie’s.