Charles Dickens' London is reimagined for the 21st century.
Twenty-four hours in the life of a city that has 371 people in every square kilometer, where every street and square shelters heroes and villains, emotional turmoil, violent allegiances, adventures, the remarkable and the everyday.
Olivier Award-winning playwright James Graham forges a uniquely crowd-sourced play, incorporating scenes by emerging writers into his own sweeping narrative. Dickens' panoply of London and Londoners, his big characters and fantastic stories in Sketches by Boz are updated for the modern age, incorporating the broadest range of voices from across the community in a theatrical whirligig of wonder and imagination.
James Graham is a multi award-winning playwright and screenwriter.
His play This House gained critical acclaim, enjoyed a sell-out run at the National Theatre's Olivier in 2013 and its 2017 West End revival was Olivier-nominated. It was chosen by popular vote as the best play of the 2010's by Methuen Drama.
James created theatre history when his two plays Ink, about the early days of Rupert Murdoch, and Labour of Love, a romantic political comedy, played in theatres next to each other in the West End in 2017. James won an Olivier award in 2018 for Labour of Love and Ink transferred to Broadway in 2019, receiving six Tony award nominations.
James' play The Vote (Donmar Warehouse) aired in real time on TV in the final 90 minutes of the 2015 polling day and was BAFTA-nominated. His most recent television film, Brexit: An Uncivil War (Channel 4/HBO) is nominated for a 2019 Emmy Award.
Naomi Westerman is a playwright and screenwriter, and former anthropologist. Her work has been performed across the UK and internationally, and she is currently Associate Company Member at the Bush Theatre. She is artistic director of the feminist theatre collective Little but Fierce, and a founding member of gender equality organisation Project Ovation.
Sumerah Srivastav is a playwright, librettist and screenwriter with a background in TV, film and radio production.
She is a regular writer on EastEnders and has been identified as a rising star in the BBC's 2017 New Talent Hotlist. She is currently one of fifteen writers selected for a year-long MediaXchange/Creative Skillset Programme on Advanced Writing for TV drama under which she is developing an original television series.
As a playwright she has been a member of the Royal Court's Critical Mass and invited Studio Writers' programmes, Orange Tree Writers Collective, Criterion playwright programme and as a librettist twice taken part in the Stratford East's Musical Theatre Initiative.
Sumerah is a full member of Mercury Musical Developments, the Royal Television Society and the Writers Guild.
Sumerah is a playwright and screenwriter.
As a playwright she has been a member of the Royal Court's Critical Mass and
invited Studio Writers' programmes, Stratford East's Musical Theatre Initiative,Orange Tree Writers Collective and The Criterion playwright programme.
Her plays include Jigsaw, Veiled & Vinegar, The Fairy King, Space Invaders, Downfall and Border Lies. Her work has been performed at Soho, Tristan Bates,Redbridge Drama Centre, Contact, Orange Tree, The Pleasance, The Barbicanand The Criterion. She is currently developing a period play with support fromthe Criterion Theatre Trust and Worthing Theatres. For the screen she has written for EastEnders and her short film Origami
starring Nicholas Pinnock and Pearl Mackie, is currently in post-production. In 2017 she was identified as a rising star in the BBC's New Talent Hotlist. This year she is as a BAFTA Crew participant and has been selected to take part in Vertical Lab, a mentoring programme by the Independent Film Trust.
A former actor, Himanshu has worked as a journalist since 2010. With a Masters from Columbia Journalism School, he has worked for The Bureau of Investigative
Journalism and Reuters before becoming a freelance writer in 2017.
This summer (2018) Ella graduated from Lincoln College, Oxford having studied English Language and Literature. In her second year of University she wrote her first full length play,
Girls will be Girls, which ran at The Oxford Playhouse's Burton Taylor Studio and at Greenside at The Edinburgh Fringe. As a teenager she had a scene she wrote performed in The Royal Exchange's Young Company show:
Talking Vaguely About Revolution (2014). Ella has just moved to London from Stockport to pursue playwriting. She is very excited to really go to The National Theatre instead of watching NTLive at her local cinema.
