Future Me (Oberon Modern Plays)

I then placed excerpts from thousands of pages of Court transcripts alongside the stories of LGBT Indians that did not make it into the courtroom. I hoped to show the ways in which the Court used a distressingly narrow reading of the law and was unable to engage or account for the narratives of queer persons.

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I was interested in seeing how the work would resonate outside the Indian context — and what better place to test this out than the country which gave us the anti-sodomy law to begin with? I was also curious to see what somebody outside the Indian context would make of the play in terms of interpreting the text on stage. What did you think of the experience of seeing the staged readings, and what do you think of the plays being published?

This festival was a powerful statement: The Arcola reading took away all the bells and whistles and focused purely on text and performance. To then have these plays part of a global conversation in an anthology that includes narratives from places like Taiwan, Jordan and Argentina is incredible.

Both India and Taiwan have made some significant moves towards legislating for queer rights in recent years though of course, social attitudes will take longer to shift. How do you think this will affect queer artists and writers, and the work they do, in the future? This has been immensely important, of course, given the specific way in which theatre provided a space for conceptions of justice that the law would not allow. I wonder if with decriminalization and other positive shifts in the law, we might have narratives where queerness is a launching point for asking other questions.

I just saw Slave Play by Jeremy O. There was a lightness to the play that I appreciated—it asked important questions, but never allowed itself to get bogged down by their seriousness. I recently came across the play G ross Indecency: Anirudh Nair and his company The Guild of the Goat, who I subsequently collaborated with on Contempt during its most recent run in Delhi , gave us Sonnets c. James Hogan, Founder Publisher, commented: Producer and Editor Titilola Dawudu talks about the moment that inspired her love of theatre, and led to the creation of the all-new monologue anthology Hear Me Now: Audition Monologues for Actors of Colour.

Classic Shakespearean jealousy, love and tragedy at its best. More significantly for a 15 year old black girl from south London, it was the first play I ever saw in the theatre. As such, I seemed a natural choice when a few of the people in my class were assigned mentors. That informal mentoring and insightful treatment was perhaps what led to me meeting Lucy Neal, the co-founder of the London international festival of theatre LiFT. What most stayed with me from that night was the fact that there was a tall, black man playing Othello, and there was a red handkerchief; I was aware that I was surrounded by older white people and that I was in this enormous theatre, and I.

Everything was dark and this piece of red material would float across the stage. Lucy Neal taking me to see this play would be the direct reason for why I am even writing this blog today. I did not want to become an actor, but I knew all the times I would write stories in my bedroom, was because of that very moment watching Othello at the National Theatre. I wanted to be a writer.

Years later I thought about the significance of David Harewood playing Othello, and what that did for a young black girl who wanted to write. I grew up in a tiny, all-white, village called St Neots, though I was born in Ibadan in Nigeria, and these two circumstances often had me confused about my identity. But not while I was writing. And not after I had seen David Harewood on this stage in my favourite Shakespeare play.

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It was last month when, after 22 years, I saw Lucy Neal again. She had seen an article that I was featured in from the Guardian, where, I spoke about my love of mentoring young women and noted that Lucy was my first and my most important mentor. It was a full circle moment for me, for when we met; in my place of work, Ovalhouse theatre, where I now mentor young girls, whom I often take to see their own very first plays.

My queer life in London was dangerous from the start. I joined when I was 19, several years before the Sexual Offences Act decriminalised homosexual acts between consenting adults. Yet homosexual scandals were always in the news. There had been several high-profile spy trials involving queer men accused of being traitors. Single young males like me were constantly under suspicion. Secret agents were everywhere. I knew I was being watched; not the sophisticated surveillance that exists today, but by some not so intelligent Intelligence Officers trailing me across London.

He grinned sheepishly and I never saw him again. Perhaps my carefree lifestyle made things easy for them. Despite the legal restrictions, I did not hide my sexuality.

Still under the then legal age, I lived openly with a man ten years my senior in Chelsea. The bar was regularly raided by the police. But it was all worth the risk. My boyfriend now no longer with us was one of the best looking guys in the neighbourhood with lots of charisma and a big smile. The crunch came at work when I received a grim notification that I was to be positively vetted by the security services. The setting was awesome and intentionally intimidating. A grand room in the old India Office in Whitehall. There sat the Head of Whitehall security, flanked by two MI5 spooks in shabby suits.

I carried on with my career. Some may judge that this experience was mild compared to the horrors suffered by queer folk today, but at the time it brought home to me the uncomfortable fact that I was different, and always would be. Today, despite changes in the law, the dangers of Queerdom are worse than ever. As we know, in Chechnya queer men are slaughtered in concentration camps. In many countries they constantly live in the shadow of death and savage punishment.

Leaders of the religious Right in America, that once liberal country, are calling for the mass extermination of queer folk. Instead, the play focuses on those anonymous queer men who leave home to face a hostile world on their own. Some of them stray into the drugs scene and may be swallowed up by it. The way I see it, queer folk must always find their happiness while living in Hell. The situation is a source of laughs and pitfalls. If you picked up a boy on the motorway who was out of his head on drugs, what would you do?

Dump him on the hard shoulder or take him home? Stan takes him home. It is my sixth production going back to when Peacefully in his Sleep was produced at the Gate Theatre, Notting Hill. In fact, that was the first original play produced at the Gate, a decade before I founded Oberon Books, specialising in new plays. There were many obstacles over 32 years investing in and consolidating the company. This is not the time to record them, but the workload has certainly got in the way of my compulsion to write. But I wonder how different things might have been if I had not been hauled up before a Kangaroo Court in Whitehall.

There was no evidence that I was spying for Russia. I was just queer. What began as a volume intended for auditioning actors, quickly became the first anthology of its kind, chronicling over one hundred years of Queer and Trans performance, including previously unknown and never-before-published works. I came on board the project a few months after its inception. Oberon has a long list of monologue volumes for practitioners, such as Monologues for Black Actors , so a queer collection had been in the pipeline for quite a while.

Once the book started to come together it became clear that we were no longer making just an audition toolkit, but. So we got rid of that — but it was a very interesting discussion to have. Talk us through the decisions the team made about which significant queer plays to include in the collection, and why. There was a lot of back and forth on some of the better-known pieces, all boiling down to: Do we need to include this uber-popular, easily accessible play?

We tried to create thought-provoking parallels with the pieces we chose — ie. We thought having them side by side offered an interesting look at differing experiences of the AIDS crisis in a mostly white New York setting versus that of a black British community. Neil Bartlett is another established writer whose work we were really keen to have — deeply political and in line with the themes of the collection. Could you elaborate on the same process, but for less well-known plays? This is really where our core aim came into play — spotlighting voices that have been side-lined within the queer community itself.

To get back to the Boy with Beer example: If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? But the real cause of the problem is far darker than Peter has admitted, and soon the world comes crashing down on him. Future me is a devastating study of unlawful desire. With unflinching honesty, it examines the destructive power of illicit deeds and the limits of forgiveness.

For someone who has crossed the line, is there really any chance of a 'future me'? Future Me premiered at Theatre in June Read more Read less. Here's how restrictions apply. Oberon Modern Plays Paperback: Oberon Books April 1, Language: Be the first to review this item Amazon Best Sellers Rank: Don't have a Kindle?

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