Following last year’s award-winning Perfect Show For Rachel at the Barbican, the acclaimed Croydon- based theatre company Zoo Co return with Night Shift at the Stanley Arts Centre. This new production, written by Alfred Fagon Award winning playwright Paula B Stanic, tells the story of a group of night workers who, while most of the population sleep, are forced together for one life-changing night shift. What unfolds over the course of a fateful Croydon evening is an epic tale of ordinary people doing extraordinary things which questions why society often overlooks the people and things we rely on the most. Night Shift will feature Zoo Co’s signature blend of ensemble movement, projection, sound and light, and each performance will be performed using innovative combinations of spoken English, BSL, visual vernacular and creative captioning. The production is part of This is Croydon, a London Borough of Culture initiative for 2023.
All Zoo Co performances are relaxed and all performances of Night Shift are creatively captioned, use BSL and are suitable for deaf and hard of hearing audiences. The performance on Friday 24 November is audio described.
Zoo Co’s Artistic Director Flo O’Mahoney said, “Night Shift is so exciting for Zoo Co: it sees us raising our ambitions for what deaf and hearing led theatre can look like. The fact that we are doing this as part of London Borough of Culture, and in our hometown of Croydon, makes this show feel especially rich.”
Night Shift co-director Duffy said “Night Shift is a very special peek into the lives of night workers, from 6pm to 6am one night in Croydon. It’s not often we get to tell these stories, especially not in BSL and visual vernacular. I think it will surprise and inspire everyone who sees it, and maybe make them think a bit differently about the night time world.”
Paula B Stanic is a London-born British playwright and the winner of the 2008 Alfred Fagon Award for her play What’s Lost. Stanic’s other works include Monday (shortlisted for the 2009 John Whiting Award), Six Minutes (Everything Must Go, Soho Theatre) and Pancras Boys Club, co-written with Ben Musgrave and David Watson. She has been a writer-in-residence at the Royal Court and Soho Theatre, and a writer on attachment at The National Theatre Studio.
Zoo Co is an award-winning theatre company, also a registered charity, that has been creating powerful, playful productions for audiences across the UK and around the world for ten years. All performances are relaxed so everyone can feel comfortable in a theatre. Strongly believing in the power of engagement and that everyone should be able to participate, Zoo Co believe that theatre is better when everybody is invited, with a lot of their work accessible for deaf audiences, using Creative Captioning and integrated British Sign Language. Their casts and creative teams include artists who are deaf, disabled, neuro-diverse, hearing, non-disabled or neuro-typical. Stanley Arts is one of South London’s premiere arts and performance venues, providing the local community with a vital home for cultural expression and discovery. As a radically inclusive space, they seek to foreground under- represented voices, providing black, global majority, working-class, neuro-divergent and LGBTQI+ creatives with a platform to reach out to audiences across South London and beyond. The company welcomes all audiences and all artists but is particularly welcoming to communities that have previously been excluded from creative spaces.
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