Untold Stories New Writing Festival brings a fresh line-up of work from emerging playwrights to the Pleasance Theatre next weekend.
The festival offers a fantastic opportunity for audience members and theatre-makers alike.
For ticket-holders, here is a chance to enjoy eight short plays for a tenner; absorbing and immersive themselves in stories that range from the light-hearted to the hard-hitting.
For the featured playwrights, Untold Stories helps them to transfer their ideas from paper in to practice, giving them the invaluable experience of performing their work to a live audience.
“Untold Stories is about getting a hands-on experience of the theatre,” says Emma Zadow, co-producer of the festival together with Mark Lindow.
“Some people do writing courses around the country, but they never get their play on stage in front of an audience. They have toolkits on how to put on the perfect production but have never seen it play out. Untold Stories is a case of helping theatre-makers get back to practically learning the craft, on the job and on their feet.”
Untold Stories made its bow in February 2017, where the festival attracted sold-out crowds to SLAM in King’s Cross while hosting 24 plays across four separate events.
From there, the festival moved first to The Arcola and next to The Pleasance, where they staged their most recent event at the start of October.
Next weekend’s performances will feature eight different short stories from playwrights around the UK and beyond. The shortest is eight minutes while the longest is 20.
Lindow says: “The night is around two hours: we have four plays that sit well together and then a similar thing for the second half.
“I play drums in a band as well, you want to make it a set – like an album – where you have pieces that work together and aren’t jarring. The plays juxtapose each other well. We’ve got comedy, a spoken word piece, a couple of dramas – so you get different types of theatre. I’ve had friends come who haven’t been in to theatre before and they have just loved the night.”
Zadow and Lindow have both written plays to feature in the next festival. Their work will slot in alongside performances of The System – a dramatic social commentary about four Londoners – and a UK premiere of Miss Irrelevant, in which a woman confronts a former footballer about a sexual encounter at his book launch.
Untold Stories is at the Pleasance Theatre, Carpenters Mews, North Road, N7 9EF on November 10 and 11. Advanced tickets are £10 and you can get them here.
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