Author: Katherine Atkinson

Following a sell-out run in Edinburgh, Luke Wright hits the road with his new show, commissioned by Inn Crowd, that critics are calling his best yet. With a new Poet Laureate due to be announced in 2019 Wrighty’s chucking his hat in the ring. He’s on a mission to write poems to unite a nation divided by austerity and Brexit. Can it be done? Can one poet ever really represent an entire nation? Big-hearted and quick witted, Wright’s poems have been lauded by everyone from Patti Smith to The Libertines. A Fringe First and Stage Award winner, Wright is truly a wordsmith and raconteur at the top of his game. In 2019 he celebrates the twentieth anniversary of his first gig. So maybe he can pull it off?

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.