Presentation Handout

Sami Ibrahim
Wind Bit Bitter, Bit Bit Bit Her

 He did his first full-length play called "Wind Bit Bitter, Bit Bit Bit Her" which was run at Vault
Festival 2018.
 It was then shortlisted for Soho Theatre's Tony Craze Award and longlisted for the
Bruntwood Prize.
 Not long after that it was published by Nick Hern Books as part of their collection of one of
the best plays of the festivals.

Synopsis: When bereaved Mother Mary finds a disembodied arm, a conspiracy builds: maybe her
child isn't quite so dead after all.

Other plays he’s written:

Two Palestinians go dogging (Royal Court Theatre; winner of the inaugural Theatre Uncut Political
Playwriting Award in 2019);

 Synopsis: A comedy that explores how the everyday becomes political and the political
becomes every day in a conflict zone.

A sudden violent burst of rain (Paine's Plough / Rose Theatre, Kingston / Gate Theatre)

 Synopsis: A poetic fable for the stage, about an impenetrable immigration system that
mirrors our own.

Force of trump (Theatre N16/The Space/Brockley Jack);

 Synopsis: Force of Trump provides an intriguing look at what might happen if Trump became
president and the trouble that would ensue.

Wonder Winterland (Oxford School of Drama/Soho theatre)

 Synopsis: WONDER WINTERLAND is a new play about broken relationships, and how far
we’re willing to go to fix them.

Other facts about Sami:

- Sami has been a writer-in-residence at Shakespeare’s Globe, one of 3 writers. He also used
to be one of the Genesis Almeida New Playwrights.
- He has been on attachment at the National Theatre Studio and Theatre Clwyd, and a
member of the Tamasha Writers Group and Oxford Playhouse Playmaker programme.
- He is currently developing a feature film, off land, with the BFI Early Development Fund, a
television project with Expanded Media and he is part of the BBC Drama Room.

Sabrina Mahfouz

Facts about Sabrina:

 - She is a British-Egyptian writer, performer and educator. She was born in Cairo but raised in
London and is now based between both cities along with LA, she first began her career in
civil service.
- In 2010, she did her first play, That Boy, at Soho Theatre and got a Westminster Prize for
New Playwrights. Then, in 2011, she became 'Creative in Residence' at The Hospital Club.
- That same year, she put on her first solo show, Dry Ice, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and
snagged the Stage Award for Acting Excellence.
- Quote about her: “People I went to see for jobs would show shock at the disparity between
my face and the name on my CV. They’d say: ‘I expected you to be a lot more foreign.’ It’s
that moment, as a teenager, when you first realise the difference between all that you are
and how the world sees you.”

More about her plays

Chef and clean:

 They have been performed at the Fringe, the Soho Theatre, the Roundhouse and in New
York, and have won numerous awards, including a Fringe First and an Off West End Award in
2018 for the children’s show Zeraffa Giraffa.

With a little bit of luck:

 It was adapted as a radio drama for BBC Radio 1Xtra

 It received its world premiere at the latitude festival 2015 and then was produced as a tour
by Pained Plough and latitude from 13th April 2016.

 It's about a girl call Nadia who is swept up in one hot summer s night of love that promises
endless possibilities. Drinking, dancing, hope, ambition, lust, greed . . . and decisions that will
determine the rest of her life.

Noughts and crosses:

 Her adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses for Pilot Theatre went on tour
around the country.

 It’s loosely based on Romeo and Juliet, focuses on a dystopian world where a segregated
society (Noughts and Crosses) is full of racial and social divides.

Poetry collection:

 How You Might Know Me, was published by Outspoken Press in 2017 and named a Guardian
Best Summer Read, and many of her plays have been published by Methuen.

 She is the editor of The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write, which was
voted a 2017 Guardian Book of the Year, and selected by Emma Watson for her feminist
book club, Our Shared Shelf.

Laura Lomas
Facts about Laura:

- Laura is a playwright and a screenwriter. She studied English at University of Nottingham and
achieved a MPhil in playwriting at Birmingham University. She has created a lot of work
including plays, radio plays and screen work.
 - She is currently writing a feature film for Film4 and The Bureau and is under commission to
The Royal Court Theatre, Nottingham Playhouse and Headlong.

Her plays:

 Metamorphoses, co-written with Sami Ibrahim and Sabrina Mahfouz, after Ovid
(Shakespeare's Globe, 2021);
 Chaos (National Theatre Connections);
 The Blue Road (Dundee Rep, Derby Theatre, Royal & Derngate and Theatre Royal Plymouth
youth companies);
 Joanne (Clean Break & Soho Theatre);
 Bird (Root Theatre and Echo);
 Blister (Paines Pough/Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama);
 Open Heart Surgery (Theatre Uncut);
 Come to Where I’m from (Paines Plough);
 Some Machine (Paines Plough/Rose Bruford);
 The Island (Nottingham Playhouse/Det Norske Oslo);
 Us Like Gods (Hampstead, Heat and Light);
 Gypsy Girl (Paines Plough Later at Soho)
 Wasteland (New Perspectives/Derby Theatre; shortlisted for the Brian Way Award).

Her radio work:

 My Boy (BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play; Bronze SONY Award for best radio drama)
 Lucy Island (BBC Radio 3).

Her screen work:

 Rough Skin (Touchpaper/Channel 4; shortlisted for Best British Short at British Independent
Film Awards and Raindance Film Festival).
 She has also written two episodes of Jack Thorne’s series Glue (E4/Eleven Films), and has
been commissioned by BBC Radio 4, Manchester Royal Exchange, and jointly by Clean Break
and Birmingham Rep.
 She was in the writer’s room for Deep State series 2 and for HANNA series 2.

How Metamorphoses was created.

Facts about it

 The inaugural Scriptorium residency – the first time that the Globe has had resident writers
in 400 years – started in the winter of 2019.
 Originally intended to last a year, the three playwrights involved in the initiative – Laura
Lomas, Sami Ibrahim and Sabrina Mahfouz – have for the past year-and-a-half been working
with Co-directors Holly Race Roughan and Sean Holmes on an adaptation of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses.
 Ovid's Metamorphoses is a single poem which compromises 15 different stories. It includes
Greek and Roman traditions, their myths, beliefs all in the forms of rhythm.

Their adaptation of Metamorphoses

  After reading their first draft, one of the co-directors said: “We realised all the stuff that
referred to 2020 was kind of detracting from the stories themselves. And bit by bit we
stripped that away and got to the emotional heart of the story.”
 After deciding which stories were more significant than others, Lomas mentioned with the
team agreeing, that Ovid’s narrative in some of the stories are contemporary.
 They kept discovering contemporary elements of each story, creating many drafts and
adapting from them.
 Until they finally created an emotional and inspiring adaptation of Ovid’s work.

What delayed Metamorphoses?

 It was supposed to hit the theatres from 4th September-3rd October 2020. However, the
national lockdown happened right before the first day of rehearsals, resulting in a very long
delay.
 The show Shifted from twelve actors to four, moving from the Globe Theatre to the Sam
Wanamaker Playhouse, and at one point being considered for a digital iteration, the show
had undergone immense changes over a year.
 The initial plan to develop the show was to have a group of actors improvising to stimuli,
which the writers would watch and then respond to in workshops. The pandemic
necessitated a rethink.
 They did this by scheduling check-ins every couple of weeks with the writers, Race Roughan
and Holmes would send out bi-weekly provocations for the writers to respond to.
 Overtime, when lockdown started to end, they were offered two workshops at the Globe,
and from there they started rehearsing.