Taking the Stage 2024 - Four Weigh-Ins and a Funeral

Exploring the bonds that form between women of different ages, classes, races and sizes at a Slimming World group. With little in common but their geography and a desire to lose weight or to keep it off, this play explores how much we truly have in common - however different we all are. Middle class bridge instructors share recipes and family gossip with Muslim matriarchs. Everyone supports each other as they go through the difficulties of their lives together - meeting every Tuesday morning and gradually forming the very strongest of bonds.

Emma Burnell - Playwright & Director

Emma is a playwright and political journalist. She first appeared on the stage at 15 in a youth opera called A Safe Place where she caught the theatre bug. But it wasn’t until middle age – and five years of reviewing theatre for a range of sites – that she found the courage to write her first play.

No Cure For Love was staged in 2021. It explored love as we age and if love songs still have the same hold over us in our sixties as they did in our 20s.

Her second play Triggered had two short runs in 2022 and was awarded an Off West End Short Run Commendation. The play was about the internal dramas that surround a local Labour Party candidate selection.

Emma’s third solo play was Venom, a feminist update of the Medusa myth which she is currently rewriting.

Emma also collaborated with other playwrights on 48 – an anthology play which was created and staged over a single bank holiday weekend in 2023.

‘Four Weigh Ins and a Funeral’ was created to celebrate the love and community Emma has received from the Tuesday morning Walthamstow SlimmingWorld group and is dedicated to Gulnaz – who Emma calls her Slimming World Mummy.