Guest Blog: Playbox Takeover
Box of Tricks is thrilled to be returning to our HOME from home at the end of January for a two-day takeover at PUSH Lab 2022, featuring brand-new plays, workshops and creative conversations that mark the culmination of 12 months spent supporting four Northern playwrights across our PlayBox development programme.
Our biannual PlayBox Takeover returns and for 2022 we’re back bigger than ever with two whole days showcasing brand new plays from our PlayBox playwrights: Stefanie Reynolds, Adam Fenton, Daneka Etchells and Mitesh Soni.
PlayBox is a year-long writer-on-attachment programme for early-career North West playwrights. Our PlayBoxers have spent the last 12 months developing new plays with dramaturgical support and workshops with Box of Tricks.
We asked them to write about their experience of developing their new plays.
Stefanie Reynolds
Play: Sasha The ??? (Rehearsed Reading: Saturday 29 January, 1.30pm)
“I wanted to write about being mixed race, and living with your white parent only. About having no connection to the other side of you, despite you looking and feeling this connection, in your body, in your soul. I wanted to talk about being Black in a small town where there is no one like you. How do you find yourself? How do you find who you are? And how do you learn about a culture that is a part of you but yet you have no grasp of.”
Adam Fenton
Play: You’re [Not] Special (Rehearsed Reading: Saturday 29 January, 3pm)
“There is always something about how disabled people are presented around the time of the Paralympics that doesn’t sit quite right with me. The portrayal of disabled athletes as ‘super-human’ can seem like a positive title to a community that is often infantilised and underestimated, but there is great danger in this way of thinking. When people’s worth is based solely on their supposed use in society and maintaining an unrealistic standard of excellence that is equally dehumanising.”
Daneka Etchells
Play: Rogue Comet(s) (Rehearsed Reading: Sunday 30 January, 1.30pm)
“Starting plays is never a formula for me – sometimes it’s an image, a song, a feeling, a theme, a moment, but I always need that Impossible Question. I think I write to try and understand the world, because I don’t really get it, honestly. I don’t really understand why humans exist as we do, why laws are so, why things just happen. So asking more and more questions, was like fuel for my little writing gremlin and petrol for the play which asks ‘what is home when the world isn’t made for you?”
Mitesh Soni
Play: Brit Bred (Rehearsed Reading: Sunday 30 January, 3pm)
“The fear and anxiety of what other people will do with your work is very real. This is my paper baby. For the past 6 months it’s only been me, and the Box of Tricks team, that have had any insight into my pages. Now, it’s time to let other people in, and let them voice their opinion. Be prepared.”
Join us as part of our PlayBox Takeover Weekend at HOME on 29 & 30 January and see rehearsed readings of all four PlayBox plays, alongside a packed programme of events and creative conversations as part of Push Lab 2022. Click here to book.
After the enforced separation of the last two years, we’re so excited about sharing these incredible plays and bringing people together to celebrate new Northern voices and stage new Northern stories.
See you there!
Adam, Hannah, Max & Al
Box of Tricks Theatre Company