Search results for ""author waleed akhtar""

'I'm not in your Britain. I'm in another Britain.' Zafar flees homophobic persecution in Pakistan to seek asylum in the UK. Londoner Bilal (or Billy as he prefers to be known) is ground down by years of Grindr and the complexity of being a brown gay man. In Soho, at 2 a.m., parallel worlds collide – and Zafar and Billy's lives are about to change forever. The P Word is Waleed Akhtar's sharp-witted and devastating play charting the parallel lives of two gay Pakistani men as they negotiate everything from casual hook-ups to the UK's hostile environment. A story of who wins in the luck of life's draw, it was premiered at the Bush Theatre, London, in 2022, directed by Anthony Simpson-Pike. It went on to win Outstanding Achievement in Affiliate Theatre at the 2023 Olivier Awards. Waleed Akhtar was named Most Promising New Playwright at the 2023 OffWestEnd Awards, for his two plays The P Word and Kabul Goes Pop: Music Television Afghanistan.

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'Today in Afghanistan there are many important issues that we are facing in our country, and I want us to look at some of these issues. So I am asking you, the audience, to help answer a very important question. Britney or Shakira?' Afghanistan. It's 2004. Farook and Samia broadcast live every day to the whole of Kabul, delivering ninety minutes of musical bliss: Britney, Backstreet Boys and Enrique Iglesias. But when their show starts to make waves, the two young friends must take on repressive forces to build a new Afghanistan. Inspired by the true story of Afghanistan's first youth music programme, Waleed Akhtar's play Kabul Goes Pop: Music Television Afghanistan explores a world following the US invasion that is complex, contradictory and shocking – all to a soundtrack of early noughties' pop. The play premiered at Brixton House, London, in 2022, directed by Anna Himali Howard, before touring the UK. It was presented with HighTide, in association with Mercury Theatre Colchester. Waleed Akhtar was later named Most Promising New Playwright at the 2023 OffWestEnd Awards, for Kabul Goes Pop and The P Word.

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A funny and honest stage play about platonic soulmates. Premiered at the Bush Theatre, London, in 2024.

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'It's a matter of perception. The hands of time turn at the same speed for everyone. Yet a child waits what seems to be an eternity for summer, whilst an old man watches a year pass in the blinking of an eye.' It's 1984, and as France play Yugoslavia in the Euros, a man meets a woman in a Parisian café. He's returning a bag that she lost on the Métro, but he doesn't tell her he stole it... Instead, he tells her the story of Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, watchmaker, inventor, and master magician of the nineteenth century. Together they set out to find a vanished theatre beneath a bank vault in the Boulevard des Italiens, to break into a museum in the Trocadero, to uncover the mystery of the Mechanical Turk, to witness the birth of the Kinetograph... and to delve ever deeper into the Art of Illusion. Le Cercle des illusionnistes by Alexis Michalik premiered in Paris in 2014 and won several Molière Awards. The Art of Illusion, Waleed Akhtar's English translation, opened at Hampstead Theatre, London, in December 2022, directed by Tom Jackson Greaves.

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Explore the big outdoors in these action-packed animal board books with sliders on every page. Published in collaboration with the National Trust, this series of board books will inspire a love of nature in even the littlest of animal lovers. With vibrant artwork printed on white board, robust easy-to-use mechanisms for tiny hands and a rhyming text with friendly animal facts, these are the perfect books to captivate curious little explorers time and time again. In this first snowy animals book, there are geese swimming on the frozen lake, hares bounding through the snow, squirrels scampering up frosty trees and many more creatures to bring to life with the moving parts.. Other titles in the series include: Countryside, Seaside, Woods, Farm and River

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