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HEAR THE DRUMS

This full length stage play focuses on Jamila, a sixteen year old girl of mixed Afghani and English parentage: on her struggle to determine her cultural identity, her longing for her father whom she has been brought up to believe is dead but whom she discovers, by chance, is alive and a prisoner of the Americans in Afghanistan – and her confronting the lies and misunderstandings that have had such tragic consequences for her family.

You can download the main text as a pdf:

HEAR THE DRUMS MAIN TEXT

A list of characters, information about where and when the action is set and acknowledgements are also available as a pdf:

HEAR THE DRUMS – CHARACTERS, LOCATION, ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ETC.

 

 

Note: the play was a prize winner in the Sussex Playwrights’ Club 2009 Full Length Play Competition.

 

 

 

 

CHILDREN’S HOUR

About teatime, when the coals were glowing

liquid orange and cream, strands of soot

would catch on the fireback,

flickering like torches in a forest.

And behind the wireless’ fretwork facade

the valves were alight with Uncles and Aunties,

soothing, articulate, evocative and refined,

bringing us safely to the Weather and the News.

We listened to the same wonders, you and I,

tuned the static and the soot to pre-pubescent stories,

sensing there was something else

beyond the sideboard.

What if we could have been told –

by a clairvoyant Romany perhaps? –

that, out in the ether,

there was someone we would want to love forever.