Sheena Patel in Wuthering Heights (2009)
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Tamasha Takes Lorca to Pakistan at Hampstead

After transforming Wuthering Heights into a Bollywood-style musical last year (See News, 19 Feb 2009), British Asian theatre company Tamasha will stage a Pakistan-set interpretation of Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba at Hampstead Theatre later this year, as part of their 21st anniversary season.

Entitled The House of Bilquis Bibi and running from 21 July to 14 August 2010 (prior to a UK tour), the play will feature an all-female cast of nine and is brought to the stage by Tamasha’s co-founders and artistic directors, writer Sudha Bhuchar and director Kristine Landon-Smith.

The action of Federico Garcia Lorca’s seminal 1936 Spanish drama, which centres on a widow and her five strictly controlled daughters, will be relocated to present-day Jhang in the Punjab region of Pakistan, "a town steeped in the popular tragic romance of Heer and Ranjha".

Other projects in Tamasha's newly announced season include Propeller, an artist training initiative culminating in a series of work-in-progress performances at the Gate Theatre (22-27 March), and the launch of Tamasha Network, a social networking tool for theatre artists throughout the UK.

The company, which counts Ayub Khan-Din's hugely successful East is East among its previous credits, is also working on a “theatre-circus” production for the 2012 Olympics, exploring London’s long history of immigration and change. The project is based on Shaun Tan’s graphic novel The Arrival, and is being developed in collaboration with north London school The Circus Space.

- by Theo Bosanquet

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