The Old Vic is delighted to announce the full line-up for One Hand Tied Behind Us curated by Maxine Peake, a one-off performance at The Old Vic on Sunday 11 March following International Women’s Day.
Sheila Atim, Jill Halfpenny, Celia Imrie, Siobhan McSweeney and Flo Wilson will perform monologues written by Bola Agbaje, Ella Hickson, Maxine Peake, Kit de Waal and Jeanette Winterson. The performance will include music from acclaimed folk band The Unthanks.
One Hand Tied Behind Us is a performance of brand new monologues, written in response to the 100th anniversary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act, which granted the first women in Britain the right to vote.
The full line up is as follows:
We Raise Girls! by Bola Agbaje, performed by Sheila Atim
Betsy, by Ella Hickson, performed by Jill Halfpenny
Contactless by Maxine Peake, performed by Siobhan McSweeney Imagine That by Kit de Waal, performed by Flo Wilson
Mother’s Little Helper 1963, by Jeanette Winterson, performed by Celia Imrie
As previously announced, The Old Vic will also be marking this anniversary year with Sylvia, the world premiere of a modern musical celebrating the life of Sylvia Pankhurst. Co-written by Kate Prince and Priya Parmar with original music by Josh Cohen and DJ Walde, Sylvia combines dance, hip-hop, soul and funk, shedding a new light on a remarkable story at the heart of the women’s suffrage movement. An Old Vic, Sadler’s Wells and ZooNation: The Kate Prince Company production, co-commissioned by 14-18 NOW, it opens at The Old Vic on 11 September with previews from 1 September.
Members of ZooNation: The Kate Prince Company performed an extract from Sylvia at March4Women on Sunday 4 March 2018.
The Old Vic is delighted to announce the full line-up for One Hand Tied Behind Us curated by Maxine Peake, a one-off performance at One Voice is a series of monologues, funded by the TS Eliot Estate, celebrating the rawest of theatre forms – a single voice on a stage without scenery and with nothing to rely on but words.
Sylvia is an Old Vic, Sadlers Wells and ZooNation: The Kate Prince Company production. It performs at The Old Vic between 1 and 22 September 2018. Co-written by Kate Prince and Priya Parmar with original music by Josh Cohen and DJ Walde. Sylvia is co-commissioned by 14-18 NOW, the UK’s arts programme for the First World War centenary, with support from the National Lottery through Arts Council England and the Heritage Lottery Fund, and from the Department for Culture Media and Sport.
Bola Agbaje graduated from the young writer’s programme at the Royal Court in 2007. Her first play Gone too Far! was selected to be performed as part of the Young Writer Festival and was performed at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in February 2007. In 2008 the play won the Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliated Theatre. The play was revived in 2008 and returned for a run in the main Downstairs space at the Royal Court, as well as the Hackney Empire and Albany Theatre. Bola was also nominated for the Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright of the Year in 2008. Her writing has been presented by the Royal Court Theatre, ATC, Tiata Fahodzi, Hampstead Theatre, Soho Theatre, Young Vic, Talawa and Cardboard Citizens. Bola’s screenplay adaptation of Gone Too Far! (produced by Poissan Rouge Pictures and the BFI) premiered at the London Film Festival in 2013 and was released in 2014. She has a sequel, Gone to Africa, currently in development with Poisson Rouge.
Jill Halfpenny’s theatre credits include Way Upstream (Chichester Festival Theatre); Abigail’s Party (Theatre Royal Bath); Legally Blonde, for which she won the What’s On Stage and Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Musical, Calendar Girls, Chicago (West End) and Uncle Vanya (Birmingham Rep). Her extensive television credits include Three Girls; Liar; Ordinary Girls 2; Death in Paradise; Humans; Babylon; Lightfields; Mount Pleasant and recurring roles in Coronation Street and Peak Practice. Her film work includes Walk Like a Panther; The Rest and How to Stop Being a Loser.
Ella Hickson is an award-winning writer whose work has been performed throughout the UK and abroad. Ella is writing new plays for Headlong Theatre, the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and Manhattan Theatre Company. Ella’s most recent play OIL, directed by Carrie Cracknell and starring Anne-Marie Duff, opened at the Almeida Theatre in 2016 and is a searing epic spanning 150 years, charting the global relationship with oil, through the prism of a mother daughter relationship. In 2013/14 Wendy and Peter Pan, her version of Peter Pan, played at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Other credits include Merlin (The Royal and Derngate, Northampton/ Nuffield Theatre, Southampton); BOYS (Nuffield Theatre, Southampton / Headlong Theatre / Hightide Festival Theatre); Decade (Headlong Theatre / St Catherine's Dock); The Authorised Kate Bane (Traverse Theatre); Rightfully Mine (Radio 4); Precious Little Talent (Trafalgar Studios / Tantrums Productions); Hot Mess (Arcola Tent / Tantrums Productions) and Eight (Trafalgar Studios / Bedlam Theatre, Edinburgh). In 2011 Ella was the Pearson Writer in residence at the Lyric Hammersmith and she received the 2013 Catherine Johnson Award. Ella is currently on writing residency at the Macdowell Colony in the US. Ella’s short film Hold on Me (dir. Samuel Abrahams) premiered at the 55th BFI London Film Festival. She has just started re-writing female thriller The Rhythm Section for Luca Guadaglino (Barbara Broccoli to produce) and will adapt Matt Haig’s book Echo Boy for producer Tanya Seghatchain and Steve Kloves, for Studio 8.
Celia Imrie last performed at The Old Vic as Goneril opposite Glenda Jackson’s King Lear, and before that played Dotty Ottley in Noises Off which transferred to the West End. Her other theatre credits
include Hayfever (Rose Theatre); Habeas Corpus (Donmar Warehouse); Acorn Antiques: The Musical (West End); Laughing Matters (St James Studio); Unsuspecting Susan (The King’s Head Theatre); The Sea (National Theatre) and The School For Scandal (RSC). Her television credits include FX’s Better Things; Doctor Who; Love and Marriage; Acorn Antiques; A Dark Adapted Eye; Kingdom; Absolutely Fabulous; Marple; Doc Martin;
Sheila Atim is currently playing Marianne Laine in The Old Vic’s West End transfer of Girl from the North
Country (Noël Coward Theatre). Her recent theatre credits include Babette’s Feast (Coronet Printroom); The Tempest, Henry IV and Julius Ceasar as part of the Shakespeare Trilogy (Donmar Warehouse); Hopelessly Devoted (Paines Plough) and Les Blancs (National Theatre). Other theatre credits include Volpone, Love’s Sacrifice, The Jew of Malta (RSC); Black Lives Black Words – The Interrogation of Sandra Bland (Bush
Theatre); Rachel (Finborough Theatre) and Klook’s Last Stand (Park Theatre). Sheila’s television credits include I Live With Models and the upcoming second series of Harlots.
Dinnerladies; The Darling Buds of May; The Riff Raff Element, and film credits include Finding Your
Feet; Malevolent; A Cure For Wellness; Bridget Jones’s Baby; Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie; The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel; Love Punch; St Trinians; Nanny Mcphee; Wimbledon; Calendar Girls; Star Wars; A Christmas Carol; The Borrowers and Frankenstein.
Maxine Peake has had a prolific run of top quality television dramas in recent years; Three Girls; Black Mirror; Silk; Criminal Justice; The Village; Hancock & Joan and Shameless. Maxine has enjoyed a range of colourful roles in film including Private Peaceful; Run And Jump; Keeping Rosy and The Theory Of Everything. She
will next be seen in Mike Leigh’s upcoming feature Peterloo, a timely exploration of the Peterloo Massacre, and in Funny Cow which premiered at last year’s London Film Festival.
With a rich list of credits in front of the camera, Maxine’s career in theatre is as equally impressive. She has performed at some of the most prestigious theatres in the country, including the National Theatre, the West Yorkshire Playhouse and the Royal Court. Maxine took the title role in Hamlet at the Manchester Royal Exchange in a ‘radical reimagining’ of William Shakespeare's play, which opened to rave reviews. She will next be seen as Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days at the Manchester Royal Exchange.
Maxine has also turned her considerable talents to scriptwriting. Starting with her first radio play Beryl: A Love Story On Two Wheels which was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and nominated for a Sony Radio Award, it was obvious that her expertise lay in writing stories as well as telling them, with a particular focus on creating female- led and female-fronted drama. Beryl was adapted into a stage play, again penned by Maxine, and produced at the West Yorkshire Playhouse as part of the Tour de France Grand Départ. Most recently, Maxine penned The Last Testament of Lillian Bilocca for Hull Truck Theatre, and her new play Queens of the Coal Age will be seen at Manchester Royal Exchange.
Siobhan McSweeney’s theatre credits include Katie Roche (Abbey Theatre); Autumn Royal (Everyman Productions); The Alchemist (RSC); As You Like It, The Captain of Kopenick, The Kitchen, Mother Courage and Her Children, England People Very Nice (National Theatre); How to Hold Your Breath (Royal Court); Fathers and Sons (Donmar Warehouse); Uncle Vanya (Lyric Theatre, Belfast); Translations (Curve Theatre) and Dancing at Lughnasa (Birmingham Rep). Television includes Derry Girls; Collateral; The Fall; No Offence and Londonirish. Film includes Darkest Hour and Alice in Wonderland: Through the Looking Glass.
Kit de Waal
Flo Wilson’s theatre credits include The Secret Garden (Theatre by the Lake); Building the Wall (Theater Drachengasse, Vienna); Richard III (Northern Broadsides); Home Is (Contact Theatre, Manchester & Richmix London); House Of Bernarda Alba (Home Theatre); Brief Encounters (Freedom Studios); Black Love, Fences and Fear Of A Black Planet (Black Arts Development Project); Everybody Loves A Winner (Royal Exchange Theatre) and The Frogs (National Theatre). Her television credits include Overshadowed; From Darkness; Johnny And Inel; From There To Here; All At Sea; Moving On; The Syndicate; Body Farm; Waterloo Road; Leaving; Vera; Monroe; Eternal Law; Coronation Street; DCI Banks; Scott And Bailey; The Mill; Shameless; Sirens and Emmerdale and A Touch Of Frost. Film work includes 42 Acres.
Jeanette Winterson OBE was born in Manchester. Adopted by Pentecostal parents she was raised to be a missionary. This did and didn’t work out. Discovering early the power of books she left home at 16 to live in a Mini and get on with her education. After graduating from Oxford University she worked for a while in the theatre and published her first novel at 25. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is based on her own upbringing but using herself as a fictional character. She scripted the novel into a BAFTA-winning BBC drama. 27 years later she re-visited that material in the bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? She has written 10 novels for adults, as well as children’s books, non-fiction and screenplays. She writes regularly for The Guardian. She lives in the Cotswolds in a wood and in London. She believes that art is for everyone and it is her mission to prove it.
was born in Birmingham to an Irish mother and Caribbean father. She worked for fifteen years in
criminal and family law, for Social Services and the Crown Prosecution Service. She is a founding member of
Leather Lane Writers and Oxford Narrative Group and has won numerous awards for her short stories and flash
fiction. My Name is Leon, her debut novel won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2017 and was shortlisted
for numerous other awards including the Costa First Book Award and the Desmond Elliott Prize. Six Foot Six, a
novella for Quick Reads is published on 1st February. The Trick to Time her second novel will be published in
March.
The Unthanks see folk music less as a style of music and more as an oral history that offers perspective in our own time. Their approach to storytelling straddles the complex relationship between modernism and learning from the past. Nominated for the Mercury Music Prize and the only British folk representation in The Guardian’s and Uncut’s best albums of the last decade, The Unthanks is a family affair for Tyneside sisters Rachel and Becky Unthank. Using the traditional and folk music of the North East of England as a starting point, the influence of Steve Reich, Miles Davis, Sufjan Stevens, Robert Wyatt, Antony & The Johnsons, King Crimson and Tom Waits can be heard in the bands 7 albums to date.
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The Old Vic, The Cut, London SE1 8NB
ONE HAND TIED BEHIND US
ONE VOICE: Monologues funded by the TS Eliot Estate Sunday 11 March, 7pm
Auditorium
Tickets: £10 & £15
SYLVIA
ZooNation: The Kate Prince Company
Written by Kate Prince & Priya Parmar
Music by Josh Cohen & DJ Walde
Lyrics by Kate Prince, Josh Cohen & DJ Walde Directed & Choreographed by Kate Prince
Sat 1 Sep–Sat 22 Sep 2018
Mon–Sat: 7.30pm, Wed & Sat 2.30pm
Press night: Tue 11 Sep, 7pm
Audio Described Performance: Tue 18 Sep, 7.30pm Captioned Performance: Thu 13 Sep, 7.30pm
TICKETS: £12, £15, £25, £35, £45
