Part of 37 Plays, a national playwriting project to create a series of 37 brand new plays that reflect the world we live in today.
SYNOPSIS
Kiya and Daniel are two friends who are desperate escape the country of their birth and make the journey to Europe. She would do anything to get there. He would do anything to stay with her. If we have to lose ourselves in order to get somewhere, will the sacrifice be worth it?
About the playwright
Amanda is a playwright, actress and jazz and blues singer-songwriter from London. In 2017 she was on the Royal Court and BBC London Writers’ Groups. In early 2019 she wrote and performed The Little Sob as part of Dark Night of the Soul at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, and returned there in early 2020 with Bessie Coleman, about the first African American female pilot as part of Notes to the Forgotten She-Wolves.
In 2020 she won the Verity Bargate Award for her play Shedding Skin, which she performed at Soho Theatre to huge critical acclaim in summer 2021, before reviving it there in March 2022. The play was shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award 2022, and she is now developing it for television with Three Tables.
Her play Recognition, about the 19th century's famous dual heritage composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, was presented originally as an audio play by 45North Ltd/Ellie Keel Productions, 2021, and is now being developed into a full length piece to be presented as Talawa’s headline show as part of Croydon’s City of Culture 2023.
And I Dreamt I was Drowning was selected for Theatertreffen Stückemarkt from over 350 plays submitted by over 60 countries to have a reading as part of the festival in Germany in May 2022, and she won the prize of a commission of a new work which will be staged at the Schauspiel Leipzig as part of the 2023/2024 season.
Amanda is also under commission to Audible as part of their Emerging Playwrights Programme and to Headlong Theatre Company, having been Writer in Residence there 2021/2, and has just completed the Young Women Opera Makers residency 2021/22 at Festival D'Aix-en Provence. She is also writing her first feature for Joy Productions / Film 4.