Sun 5th May: Diaspora
7.30pm - Starlings by Miranda Gold
Director Jacob Wolstencroft
Starlings reaches back through three generations of inherited trauma, exploring how the impact of untold stories ricochets down the years. This one woman play adapted from Miranda Gold's first novel finds a family unravelling as the unspeakable finds a voice.
Struggling to bear the legacy of her grandparents' experience of the Holocaust and her mother's desperate fragility, Sally seeks to reconnect with her brother Steven. Once close, Steven seems a stranger to her now that he has left London for Brighton. The echoes of their history once bound them - but it is an inheritance Steven can no longer share.
8.20pm - Navkiran Mann
Navkiran Kaur Mann is a writer and poet. She has performed for the Commonwealth Games in Dubai as part of the Queen's Baton Relay, for the Royal Shakespeare Company production of "Faith" in Coventry Cathedral Ruins. Her poems have been displayed at London Bridge Railway Station through Apples and Snakes as well as the Pastoraal Informatiecentrum in Hasselt, Belgium. She is working on her first poetry collection. She is co-director of Thrive Poetry Festival which develops and platforms under-represented artists in their mother tongues.
Wes Finch
British singer/songwriter Wes Finch mixes together folk, blues, Americana and literate indie pop. Starting in Coventry, he spent a number of years fronting a rotating roots ensemble called the Dirty Band with which he recorded an album and 3 EPs.
Echoes of American artists like Conor Oberst, Elliot Smith, and Ryan Adams can be heard in Finch’s style, which feels rooted in folk music but has the ambition and sophistication of pop.
Wes featured with The Dirty Band at the 2023 Springboard Festival and is set to work with a number of artists during the 2024 installment.
9.20pm - Honey and Salt by Zsofia Hacsek
Director Karen Evans
Honey and Salt is a short character sketch, a sort of love triangle between overwhelmed Wife, epileptic Dog, and stroke-affected Husband. How does life taste when you have to relearn things, redefine roles, and live with unevenly distributed responsibility in your family? Zsófia Hacsek has been the author of prose, poetry, journalistic and academic pieces, and a novel, but this is her first flash drama to escape her drawer and meet the audience."
9.25 - Zsophia Hacsek
9.30pm - Grace by Dean Sheridan
Director Dean Sheridan
THEN: Eighteen years ago Grace made a choice, chose the iron certainty of her Catholic faith over her love of her wayward daughter, since bitterly regretting taking that path.
NOW: Presented with the spiky bundle of white hot fury in a chasm of need that is her orphaned granddaughter, Grace must choose again. Should she cling on to the last of the moral high ground, or abandon the remains of her everlasting soul to face the desperate need of what’s left of her family? A stunning morality fable from local writer and company member Dean Sheridan, who directs his own work.