Humans of StoryFest - Mohamed-Zain Dada
Tim Whitby
Mohamed Zain-Dada on his new version of Kafka's The Trial for StoryFest, supported by STUDIOCANAL, Urban Myth Films and the Cockayne Foundation. As told to Beatrice Updegraff.
Thursday 23 – Saturday 25 in the NYT Workshop Theatre
“My name is Mohamed Zain Dada. I’m a playwright and screenwriter. I have always written spoken word and poetry as a young person, but sort of left it behind when I went to uni, and only really encountered new writing in theatre through doing an internship at the Bush Theatre. I wrote a scene just to play around and experiment, and was encouraged by the artistic director of the Bush Theatre at the time to apply for different schemes. I applied for the Royal Court’s playwriting programme and wrote my first play called Blue Mist, which went on at the Court four years later. That sort of led me to understand the world of theatre and feel really excited about the possibilities of writing for stage.”
“I never had any engagement as a young person with the NYT, and I wish I did because I think it’s such an incredible incubator for young people who are just excited to make work and tell stories. I know, for example, the director Milli Bhatia, who’s directed two of my plays, was on the NYT. Another actor I really admire, Zainab Hasan, is an NYT alum. StoryFest is an opportunity to share work in progress in front of a live audience, and an opportunity to work with the current cohort of NYT members. It’s the first time for me adapting a text, and it’s a fun challenge for me as a writer. It’s also fun to go back to that original thing of play, when it comes to theatre, and getting into a room and being able to explore and see what lands and what doesn’t land. For me, it’s the perfect balance before hopefully continuing to develop a piece of work.”
“I guess I’ve been trying to come to terms with how strange it is to live in the time that we do. It’s sometimes like that phrase, ‘The truth is stranger than fiction,’ is probably more real than ever now because things happening in the world, it’s kind of hard to really make sense of things. If you look at moments in history where that’s happened before you have movements around absurdism and surrealism. Kafka wrote The Trial as some sort of precursor to fascism that came afterwards. But the novel itself, in its form and its language, is absurd. It’s strange, it’s slightly weird, and for some reason this moment in time really appealed to me in terms of feeling thematically in line with what I felt really interested to write about. What I quite often look out for in any artistic medium is something to help me just make sense of things. I think it’ll hopefully make you laugh and think about the world in a different way. The aim of this at least is to try and think about our apathy and the sense of despair that people might feel, and artistically or theatrically, how you could try and shake yourself out of that.”
“My thing that I always think about is how do you get non-theatregoers into the theatre? For me, that’s the fun challenge of trying to write something. Would my aunt go to this? Would my cousin, would my nephew and nieces, none of whom necessarily grew up in theatre like me how would they, how do we get them there? I think the challenge of reaching in and chatting to people about shows that they might want to see requires real effort and graft and work. Culture should be for everyone, right? You have a very specific type of audience often in theatres. The problem is there’s a huge chunk of that audience that are missing. If you create work that thematically speaks to people, they will come and see it, and they will spend that money. There’s an assumption that audiences won’t come to shows, but people will come and spend their money if work speaks to them.”
“Chris Morris, the writer who wrote Four Lions, apparently likes to write things that make people ‘laugh, cry, and riot.’ I feel like that’s an ambition of how I would like to write. Comedy is quite key theatrically, but also a kind of element of surrealism. You want to expand a sense of their imagination and want them to feel a real sense of being moved in some way, whether that’s through laughter or whether that’s through the expression of feeling that a company’s trying to bring to you. and ideally, try and see the world in a different way when you leave.”
Book Pay What You Decide Tickets for The Trial | Running Thursday 24, Friday 25, Saturday 26 July.
