The 37 Plays - Reading Act 2

Booking required

An evening of readings from The RSC’s 37 Plays Project. To open the evening, extracts from Leah Philbin’s Broke will be read by community performers. This play was submitted to the 37 Plays Project. The second part of the evening is a full reading of Still Life (WIth Mangos) by Ruby Kitching, which was one of the final 37 plays selected by The Royal Shakespeare Company.

Still Life (With Mangos) is a play about a British-Bangladeshi working mum, Joya, who is grieving the death of her Father and finds herself unable to connect with herself and the community she grew up in. She joins a ladies art class as a distraction, but mistakenly becomes the model. After an unsettling start, the experience is surprisingly enlightening as she starts to value herself more through art and friendship.

French artist, Paul Gaugin’s paintings of brown women, together with the students’ portraits of Joya, make her feel empowered. After sharing her experience with her British-Bangladeshi male colleague, Shaheen, rather than her huband, thinking he wouldn’t approve, Shaheen commissions Joya’s teacher, Alex, to paint a nude portrait of Joya. Joya seeks solace and sanctuary in an art gallery, learning new and difficult information which has connections and resonance with some of her own experiences. Joya feels that she needs to reclaim her true self and belief in art, and does so in a way that she would never have expected.

Still Life (With Mangos) was submitted to the RSC’s 37 Plays Competition and was successfully chosen as one of the 37 Plays. Full details of the 37 Plays Project