Don’t miss a staged reading of Ella Hickson’s works on Monday 16th December. ONE NIGHT ONLY!
Ella Hickson, one of the UK’s most innovative, challenging and talented playwrights, will be visiting Madrid as the guest of honour of “Play & Breakfast”, a programme of month-long monographic workshops offering arts professionals and theatre enthusiasts the opportunity to learn more in detail about the latest tendencies in British drama, organized in Madrid by Bella Batalla, Esto Podría Ser and the Teatro de la Abadía in collaboration with the British Council / New UK Drama.
The season’s third workshop has focused on Ella Hickson’s works and will culminate in a staged reading in Spanish by professional actors of extracts from a selection of her plays. Open to the public, the reading (moderated and simultaneously translated by Nacho Aldeguer and Luis Sorolla) will be followed by a Q&A with the playwright in which she’ll be discussing the vision and motivation behind her works before leading into a dialogue with the audience. More information here
About Ella Hickson:
An instant hit and the winner of three prestigious awards at its 2008 debut at the Edinburgh Festival, Ella Hickson’s first play “Eight”, a series of monologues written when she was 23, was subsequently performed in New York and transferred the following year to London’s West End. Since then and throughout her career her works have continued to challenge traditional theatrical conventions and confront serious social issues, bringing her public and critical acclaim throughout the UK and abroad.
Ella’s theatre is often concerned with portraying the realities of life as a young person in modern Britain. It also engages with such deep-seated issues as energy and the environment (“Oil”, premiered in 2016, is a play about the global implications of our dependency on oil as well as mother-daughter relationships) or gender politics and power structures (her 2018 play “The Writer” features a female playwright pushing against patriarchal power and challenging the status quo). She frequently makes use of unconventional staging formats: her 2019 play “Anna”, a thriller set during the Cold War, was co-created with sound designers Ben and Max Ringham and requires the audience to wear headsets in order to direct their attention amongst the overlapping scenes on stage.
As from January “Play & Breakfast” will be focusing its spotlight on Rory Mullarkey, Chris Goode, Alexi Kaye Campbell, Lucy Prebble and Patrick Marber.