The issue of female genital mutilation is to be explored on stage in a theatre production based on the real stories of girls and their mothers in the UK.
The National Theatre of Scotland is collaborating with Contact theatre in Manchester for a new production created by the director Cora Bissett and the performance poet and actor Yusra Warsama.
It will be called Rites, based on interviews across the UK, including the experiences of midwives, lawyers, police officers, teachers and health workers, .
Bissett said they hoped the production would not “seek to demonise any one culture.”
She added: “We hope to ask questions of practices contained within many cultures and give space to discuss those very sensitive areas where cultural practice and human rights come into direct conflict.”
“What we hope is that Rites will express, articulate and explore the complexities of FGM,” added Warsama. “The grey areas we are too scared to look at because it sits in the realm of cultural differences. One of the few realms where these complexities can be explored, such as culture, understanding, pain, body image, social injustice, race and sexual control is theatre.”
The production is the NTS’s first collaboration with Contact and will open at the Tron in Glasgow in May before moving to Manchester, Bristol and Edinburgh.
Rites was announced in Glasgow as part of NTS’s 2015 season, with nine world premieres and adaptations of books by Muriel Spark and Compton Mackenzie.
The Spark adaptation will be a stage version of the novel she once said was her favourite, The Driver’s Seat, a modern classic – often described as a psychological thriller - which tells, in little over 100 pages, the story of a woman who seems to know her own dreadful destiny.
The NTS’s artistic director Laurie Sansom is adapting and directing a production that will open at the Lyceum in Edinburgh in June. Sansom said it was one of Spark’s “most perfect and idiosyncratic books”.
He said he was thrilled. “Capturing Spark’s voice on stage is always a challenge, but this has to be one of her most dramatic and mysterious stories, lending itself to theatrical reinvention.”
The season will be called Belong and also include plays by Russian and Ukrainian writers exploring the current Crimean conflict; a Gaelic version of Compton Mackenzie’s Whisky Galore; and a comedy by Douglas Maxwell set in a Scots-Italian fish and chip shop and called Yer Granny.
