Graeae Announces Crips With Chips At Home

In February 2020, Graeae launched Crips With Chips at the company's home, Bradbury Studios, in what was to be the first in a series of accessible scratch nights, featuring new work by Deaf and disabled writers. The second was scheduled for a few weeks later but then, in March, COVID struck and plans were put on hold.

Now a year on, and following on from two seasons of the hugely successful online series Crips without Constraints, the company has announced that the scratch-night will resume on Tuesday 20th April at 8pm with Crips With Chips At Home. Live and online, the evening will bring together five Deaf and disabled writers, each presenting a short play written in response to a brief to create a work in answer to a randomly assigned TV genre.

Recognising how many have turned to TV boxsets during the long periods of lockdown of the past year, Graeae has created its own version of the phenomenon. Playing on the theme of TV genres, Crips with Chips At Home is presented as a collection of work, stretching across a whole panoply of TV styles, from sci-fi to period drama, nature documentary to coming-of-age, with some super-hero action thrown in for good measure! Each will be performed live with script in hand by some of the UK's finest Deaf and disabled actors (to be announced).

Hosted by Sharon D Clarke (seen in The Gift for Crips without Constraints) and Leanna Benjamin (writer of The Gift), the evening will comprise works by Amy Bethan-Evans (Write to Play alumni), Adam Fenton (Crips without Constraints - Cooped Up), Kathryn Golding 金葉 (Write to Play alumni, Crips without Constraints - Parasite) and writing for Graeae for the first time Kate Lovell and Nicole Joseph. Music will be composed by Max Runham (Reasons to be Cheerful). Cast and directors are to be announced. Information will be available at https://graeae.org/our-work/crips-with-chips-at-home/

Graeae Associate Director Nickie Wildin says -

"I'm so excited to be bringing Crips With Chips At Home to global online audiences. We're keeping the momentum of our real-life platform that started in February last year, but which then had to take a backseat due to the pandemic.

This is an opportunity for five brilliant Deaf, disabled and neurodiverse writers to showcase their work via an online platform, this time LIVE! We're telling the world that we are here, making our work, telling our stories, and not going anywhere.

The 'boxset' theme has developed some really exciting work and has pushed the writers out of their comfort zone to play with form. We can't wait to see what they've written come to life (while eating chips, of course*!)"

*chips not included but choice of recipes available online*

Graeae will also post recipes for the best chips in town for audience members to enjoy whilst watching this engaging and entertaining anthology of work.

The evening will be audio-described, British Sign Language interpreted and captioned.

Crips With Chips At Home can be booked from 10am on Thursday 8 April. Tickets are free but donations to Graeae are encouraged at www.justgiving.com/graeae.

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