Suzette Coon showcases brand new play at Taking The Stage
23rd August 2024
Playwright and theatre-maker Suzette Coon joins us at Taking The Stage on Wednesday 16th and Saturday 19th October to showcase her brand new play ‘In A Key Of Her Own’ at Milton Keynes Gallery.
She will also be taking part in the first of our three Q&A sessions on Wednesday 16th October, where she will be discussing ‘Where do we go from here?’ with fellow panellists Lynda Rooke (Equity President and Chair), Jennifer Tuckett (Theatre Lab) and Polly Kemp (Theatre Lab and ERA50:50).
We are incredibly lucky to have such an accomplished playwright with us at Taking The Stage who has such vast experience in writing and the theatre industry.
Suzette’s plays have been shown at theatres, including Southwark Playhouse, Arcola Theatre and Theatre 503. Suzette has been long-listed and short-listed numerous times for BBC Writers’ Room and has been selected for the Criterion Writing Programme and the Sphinx Theatre’s Sphinx30 Lab, a development programme which supports female British playwrights with mentoring and a seed commission to create new work for the main stage.
For Sphinx she developed ‘A Jewish Love Story’ about three generations of Jewish women in England and it was supported by Watford Palace Theatre and Arts Council England.
Most recently her play The History of Animals received development at Omnibus Theatre and her new play Killer Whale was commissioned by A Million Fred Productions for a UK tour.
Just like us at The Play’s The Thing, Suzette and her theatre company, Little Pieces of Gold, are dedicated to championing and producing new writing. Little Pieces of Gold has staged over 400 new short plays, facilitated long-term creative collaborations for writers and directors, and facilitated literary agent representation for playwrights. It has a strong track record of showcasing the work of under-represented writers, with over a thousand writers submitting their work each year through an open submission process.
Suzette edited the inspirational book ‘Short Plays with Great Roles for Women’, an anthology of 22 short plays by women that put women right at the heart of the story. The collection has been described as an “antidote to casting anomalies” offering “nuanced, intelligent roles for actors of different ages and backgrounds in plays about relevant and diverse topics”.
The anthology includes plays by award-winning playwrights such as Tatty Hennessy, Jaki McCarrick, Yasmin Joseph, Joanne Lau, Fran Bushe, Daisy Stenham and Fiona Doyle, with a foreword by playwright and screenwriter Morgan Lloyd Malcolm. It was published by Routledge Books in 2020 both in the UK and abroad.
In addition to these fantastic achievements, Suzette is also a playwriting tutor having tutored and mentored in various colleges. She has been a mentor on the Royal Central School of Drama’s MA/MFA Writing for Stage & Broadcast Media, and runs affordable playwriting workshops for aspiring writers.
To have someone of Suzette’s stature at our festival, not only sharing her knowledge and passion for playwriting but showcasing her brand new play will be incredibly inspiring for many of us.
‘In A Key Of Her Own’ is the first of ten new plays written by female playwrights that we are staging at our four-day festival. The play synopsis:
“In 1846 it is taboo for women to be professional composers and to play to the general public and so the great composer Fanny Mendelssohn’s music is published under her brother’s name. In 2015 an A Level music student is shocked to discover not a single female composer on the Edexcel A Level Music syllabus. Both women set out to change the course of history. Inspired by true events.”
A fascinating topic that shows how women have been fighting for their rightful place in society for hundreds of years but continually having their voices stifled in a very male-dominated world. What makes it more interesting is that it is based on a true story, and we are of course all captivated, intrigued and excited by the lives of others.
We hope that seeing Suzette’s new work and being in conversation with her will encourage and inspire both current writers and future ones too, particularly the next generation.
As always with our festivals we invite incredible women from within the arts to help us champion new writing, inspire and develop new plays from local playwrights and the next generation, and discuss key subjects that aren’t spoken about enough.
We are incredibly proud and excited to bring a strong line up of women from the arts industry to our local stage, and we hope that you will be able to join us to support and celebrate these brilliant women.
For full details of Taking The Stage please visit the MK Gallery website.
Thank you to Arts Council England for supporting this event.
