Playing With Facts
Exercises & Extracts
Exercise One: Read Extract One
Exercise Two: Read Extract Two
Exercise Three: List 5 facts from today or your lifetime that you think are interesting.
Extract Three will be read during the workshop.
6pm, Monday 25th November 2024
Research is a key part of the process of writing a play – but it is perhaps most important when a playwright approaches adapting history for the stage. How do you take your research and condense it into a story and characters that you are in control of – and that aren’t in control of you? What do you keep in and what do you leave out – how do you choose?
Join actress and award-winning playwright Lolita Chakrabarti OBE as she explores how to find, research and create stories from history. This livestream workshop will inspire your sense of storytelling, and ensure that you can confidently answer the question ‘why am I telling this story now?’
Simply head to the homepage of this website www.writeaplay.co.uk at 6pm Monday 25th November to join – we will be taking questions from our online audience throughout! Don’t worry if you can’t make it live, the recorded workshop will be archived and made available on a webpage afterwards.
About Lolita Chakrabarti OBE
Lolita Chakrabarti OBE is an actress and award-winning playwright. She trained at RADA and has been on our stages and screens for over thirty years.
Writing credits include her adaptation of the Booker Prize winning novel Life of Pi, for which she won the Olivier Award for Best Play. Life of Pi ran for over 14 months in the West End, sold out in Boston, then opened on Broadway in March 2023. This production won 5 Olivier Awards, 4 UK Theatre Awards and 3 Tony Awards and a WhatsonStage Award for Best Play, amongst others. Lolita adapted Hamnet, from the best-selling novel by Maggie O’Farrell, which opened for a sold-out run at the RSC, before transferring to London’s West End. Her original play Hymn opened at the Almeida Theatre in 2021, it was also live streamed, screened on Sky Arts and will have its US Premiere at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre in Spring 2025.
Her debut play Red Velvet opened at the Tricycle Theatre, London, before transferring to St Ann’s Warehouse in New York and to London’s West End at The Garrick Theatre. It earned her the Evening Standard Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright 2012; The Critics’ Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright 2013; AWA for Arts and Culture 2013 and an Olivier Award nomination for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre 2012, as well as many other nominations. Red Velvet is now on the Drama syllabus for A level, is studied at universities in the UK and USA and there have been countless productions in the USA and beyond. Lolita curated The Greatest Wealth (Old Vic), commissioning eight new monologues to celebrate the NHS. She also dramaturged Sylvia (Old Vic) and Message in a Bottle (Peacock Theatre/US tour) for Kate Prince.
Her acting credits include The Hunt (St Ann’s Warehouse, New York), Gertrude, opposite Tom Hiddleston, in Sir Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (RADA), Last Seen – Joy (Almeida Theatre) which she also wrote, Screw (CH4), Vigil (BBC1), Showtrial (BBC1), Wheel of Time (Amazon), A Casual Vacancy (BBC1/HBO), Criminal (Netflix) and Delicious (Sky One) and Summer ’54, a double bill of Rattigan plays (UK Tour 2024).