my work as a writer
These Are Our Neighbours
These Are Our Neighbours combines light, music, words, dance and circus into process-driven dance theatre. It is a celebratory narrative of what it is to be ‘other’ in Scotland today.
The first strand takes the form of a love letter to our European siblings who live here in Scotland as we experience the reality of Brexit together.
The European Scots narrative is interwoven with the second strand, which recounts the huge demonstration that happened in Kenmuir Street, Glasgow, in May 2021. Residents from the street, and across Glasgow, ensured that the Home Office could not take their neighbours away to be deported. They chanted 'These are our neighbours. Let them go'.
Stage 1 (Residency and Research) of the project was supported by Creative Scotland, and An Tobar & Mull Theatre.
Stage 2 (Development) of the project was supported by Creative Scotland, and An Tobar & Mull Theatre, as well as by community organisations around Pollokshields and Glasgow Southside.
Kemure Street Protest: May 2021
Strangeways Rooftop 1990
Drawing: Oliver Townsend
Strangeways
Strangeways is set during the 2015 rooftop protest at the prison, where memories of the 1990 siege echo the landings.
Today isn’t like any other day in the Drug-Free Wing at HMP Manchester. There is a prisoner on the roof, and the recovery workers can feel the tension rising.
Lisa is holding on by a thread. Louise is trying to negotiate the ethics of signing off a travel order on a prisoner who isn’t well enough to leave Strangeways prison, never mind being deported on a charter flight. And Michael isn’t the Immigration Officer that they were expecting.
Strangeways is a story of recovery, rehabilitation and redemption, within a system that isn’t famous for its humanity.
A development of Strangeways was supported by Stellar Quines and Creative Scotland between December 2020 and February 2021.
Walk With Me
Walk With Me is hugely informed by my work in the Calais Refugee Camp (the Jungle) and also addresses the structural racism that is woven into the fabric of the UK. Walk With Me is, as all of my work is, ultimately a love story and an honouring of the spirit of the characters portrayed. It is an acknowledgement of the very best in humanity that shines so brightly against the system that seeks to contain it.
Walk With Me was performed as part of Vault Festival in 2017. The week of performances were script-in-hand rapid response readings featuring a number of different actors as Michael and Sasha, and live drawing from artist and set designer Oliver Townsend. It then transferred to the Bloomsbury Festival where it was performed alongside Maddy Costa’s CALAIS, a verbatim account of the forced demolition of the Jungle.
Love Letters to the Home Office - the play and the book
One of the key outcomes of the Love Letters to the Home Office project was a book, curated by myself and the core team, which exists to raise awareness of the income-based human rights tiering of the UK’s Family Migration Rules, as well as to celebrate the love, strength and humanity of those affected.
I adapted this book into a stage play which was performed for two nights at BAC in London as part of a political festival in May 2015. There were script-in-hand rapid response readings in Paines Plough’s Roundabout at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2015 and at West Yorkshire Playhouse in July 2016.
'Emotive and powerful... the strength of its message and the heart-rending passion of the actors and director alike as they wove through details of personal stories with facts about the law itself were captivating.' Middle East Monitor
