New Play About Violence and Love Takes the Stage in AN INJURY

Morvern wants to get up and walk away from this desk. Danny wants to write something revolutionary. Joe wants to protect what good we still have left. And then there's Isma. We don't know much about Isma. We know she's twelve. We know she speaks only Arabic. We know she's here. And we know she's watching. Here, in this room, four speakers pick through the fragments of four shattered lives.
After their award-winning collaboration on Heads Up, writer Kieran Hurley (Beats, Hitch) and director Alex Swift (How to Win Against History, Mess) team up once again, to create a thrilling new play about violence, love, the distance between us, and the harm we do to each other.

The cast includes Khalid Abdalla, British Egyptian actor and activist best known for starring in the award winning film, United 93. He also starred in The Kite Runner and acted with Matt Damon in Green Zone. Abdalla appears as himself in Jehane Noujaim's documentary on the ongoing Egyptian revolution, The Square, which won the Audience Award at Sundance Festival in 2013. Abdalla is on the board of the National Student Drama Festival and is one of the founding members of the Mosireen Collective in Cairo: a group of revolutionary filmmakers and activists dedicated to supporting citizen media across Egypt in the wake of Mubarak's fall. Three months after it began, Mosireen became the most watched non-profit YouTube channel in Egypt of all time, and in the whole world in January 2012.

Kieran is a writer, performer, and theatre maker based in Glasgow. Past work includes Heads Up (Show & Tell), Rantin (National Theatre of Scotland), Beats (The Arches), Chalk Farm (co-written with AJ Taudevin, Oran Mor/ ThickSkin). Awards include Best New Play, Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland (CATS) 2017 for Heads Up, and 2012 for Beats. Kieran is a former recipient of the Pearson Playwrights Award (now the Channel 4 Playwrights Scheme) for which he spent a year as writer-in-residence at the National Theatre of Scotland. Kieran's debut screenplay, an adaptation of his play Beats co-written with Brian Welsh who also directs, is currently in production with Ken Loach's Sixteen Films and Steven Soderbergh attached as an executive producer. The film is supported by the BFI and Creative Scotland.

Alex Swift is a performer, director and theatre-maker. He is Artistic Director of Permanent Red Theatre Company and an Associate Artist with Daedalus Theatre Company. Recent work includes How To Win Against History by Seiriol Davies (Assembly Edinburgh, Young Vic and tour to come in winter 2017), Heads Up by Kieran Hurley (Summerhall and touring) which Me and Mr C by Gary Kitching (Ovalhouse and touring), Error 404 by Daniel Bye (Polka and touring), Fat Man by Martin Bonger (Vault and touring), Mess (Traverse and touring) by Caroline Horton, Puffball by Caroline Williams (BAC, The Yard), and I Told You This Would Happen by Kathryn Beaumont (ARC Stockton and touring). He developed his solo show, Travesty, at Theatre in The Mill, Bradford. He trained at École Philippe Gaulier in Paris and his work has won two Stage Awards for Acting Excellence, The Bush Theatre Directing Award, A Broadway Baby, Bobby The Vault Pick of the Festival Award and an Argus Angel.

Permanent red was founded by Artistic Director Alex Swift, Executive Producer Annabel Turpin and Associate Artist Kieran Hurley in 2017. Permanent Red's mission is to make accessible, playful, rigorously political work across forms and genres and to provide alternative spaces for living, thinking and feeling in the contemporary world. They run a roving performance in development space called The Territory which aims to create a place for artists to perform work they feel they are not allowed to elsewhere. An Injury is their first show as a company.

@Ovalhouse | #AnInjuryPlay | www.permanentred.co.uk