Tamasha Theatre Company in collaboration with Mulberry School for Girls in Shadwell is facilitating a pilot attachment scheme for eight playwrights to create new dramatic writing in a school environment. The writers are supported through a structured series of workshops with staff, students and alumni of the school to develop short scripts for performance inspired by their conversations and experiences. Alongside this, a parallel group of playwrights, poets and lyricists based at Tamasha collectively explore and feed into the theme ‘small lives, global ties’, which is central to Tamasha’s current projects.

The screening of Bred and Born (Mary Pat Leece and Joanna Davis, UK, 1983) from the Cinenova collection is followed by a discussion, in which Tamasha hope to address the issues raised by the film in relation to the work of these two writers’ groups. For the playwrights based at Mulberry School for Girls, this is an opportunity to reflect on and share their own experiences of research and creative collaboration with young women in contemporary East London, and their encounter with what the film calls the “power in asking questions and looking at answers”. For the second group of writers, and more broadly in the context of Tamasha’s work, this is a chance to extend their investigation of what it means to make ‘culturally specific work’, issues of representation, and the relationship between personal narratives and collective identities.