Ng Choon Ping Presents Pure O

Ng Choon Ping presents Pure O by Gareth Jandrell and directed by Ng Choon Ping at the King’s Head Theatre.

Nick has OCD. He doesn't wash his hands. He doesn't turn lights on and off. He doesn't avoid cracks in the pavement. He has a job, he has a girlfriend and he's in control. Until today.
Nick has OCD, and it's started screaming at him.

Winner of Tobacco Factory's Script Space 2010 Gareth Jandrell’s new play PURE O is a darkly comical tale of one man's battle with a lesserknown but no less destructive form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Encompassing Nick’s breakdown and troubled rebuilding through Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, the play gives a contemporary, fresh, and politically incorrect look at the stigmas attached to mental illness. Razor-sharp, jet-black, and Diazepamhazed, Pure O presents a fish eye view of a man fighting a battle no one else can see.

Singaporean director Ng Choon Ping debuts in London, turning the King’s Head stage into a memoryscape that Nick returns to again and again, recontructing it with each revisit, always convinced he had gotten it wrong.

Gareth Jandrell’s short plays Lomki and Amanah were performed at the Southwark Playhouse and Tuesday at the Soho Theatre. In PURE O he draws on his own and other’s experiences of the stigmas, misconceptions and barriers mental illness to presents darkly comic
look at the realities of mental illness.

A graduate of the Kings Head's Directors Programme and Assistant
Director on their production of Constance, the controversial new Oscar
Wilde play, Ng Choon Ping directs a talented cast including Jack
Hughes (Stovepipe Ensemble, National Theatre and Bush coproduction), stand up comedienne Rachel Stubbings ("Brilliant" Larry
Charles, producer Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm), and
Christopher Hughes (The Story Project, Southwark Playhouse).

The King's Head Theatre is London's first pub theatre since Shakespeare's time, founded in 1970 with 50 West-End/Broadway transfers to its credit. Multi-Award winning Adam Spreadbury-Maher
became the venue's second ever Artistic Director in March 2010 and relaunched the venue with a revolutionary opera programme. The King's Head Theatre now performs in repertory, the only fringe theatre in the UK with such a bold programme of self-produced work including the Olivier Award Winning La Boheme and Britten's The Turn of the Screw. Since 2008 Spreadbury-Maher's Production Company Good Night Out Presents has become well renowned for staging world premieres and first time revivals of work by some of the most wellknown and respected playwrights of the modern era including Edward Bond, Peter Gill, Nick Ward and Tennessee Williams.

PREVIEWS
6 December – 10.00pm
SEASON
December 7-17 December
Tickets: £10
at the King's Head Theatre
115 Upper Street
Islington N1 1QN
www.kingsheadtheatre.com
0207 478 0160