The Company

Mama Quilla is an award-winning woman-led theatre company spotlighting human rights issues. It was founded by Kay Adshead and Lucinda Gane in 1999 to offer a female perspective on the big issues of the day.

It also recognizes and seeks to combat the waste of resources and talent in female theatre practitioners over the age of 40.

Its first three major productions, The Bogus Woman (Fringe First, Manchester Evening News Best Fringe Performer Award, shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award and an EMMA Award), Bites (shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award), and Bones,  were all performed at The Bush Theatre and published by Oberon Books.

Actors who have worked with Mama Quilla include Noma Dumezweni, Sarah Niles, Ishia Bennison, Karena Fernandez, Chris Jarman, and Pauline Moran.

The Bogus Woman, Bites and Bones have all subsequently been produced internationally. The Bogus Woman (La Femme Fantôme) and Bones (Bones (Les Os)) by La Compagnie Yorick and Bites (Morsi/Bisse) by Teatrificio.

Mama Quilla also works in the community with the vulnerable and dispossessed, creating innovative street/site-specific performance theatre, celebrating their voices and exploring their experience. Mama Quilla has a seven year creative partnership with the Crossroads Women's Centre, which is home to WAR (Women Against Rape), LAW (Legal Action for Women), and the All African Women's Group, as well as many other organisations. In partnership, we explore issues in workshops: Buried Pasts, Put Yourself in Our Shoes, The Wookarooka, etc., often creating miniature performances. We also lead awareness raising events. A Night Out of the Asylum at the Tricycle Theatre, June 2007, highlighted the plight of women and children in detention in the UK. In January 2012, we plan a one day event exploring and celebrating women and the global protests.

In education, Mama Quilla devises original, often large-scale,  productions from young people's own experiences. Since 2007, we have worked in partnership with the Barking College of Performing Arts making two epic productions a year involving over 50 students in each production: Lady Chill, Lady Wad, Lady Lurve, Lady God, originally an RNT commission, and War Song, Stuffed, Five Crimes Reconstructed, Woolworths the Musical, Boys Talking, Sweet Papaya Gold, and If Anyone Recognises These Young People?, all new plays devised and directed by Kay Adshead and performed at The Broadway Theatre, Barking.

‘Mama Quilla shows that theatre still has the capacity to address public issues.’ – The Guardian

The Bogus Woman

A young woman arrives in a strange country. A woman who has committed no crime.

She is indefinitely confined, humiliated and racially and sexually abused. She witnesses her guards' petty dishonesty and casual brutality. She sees innocents scapegoated and worst of all she hears the authorities lie and lie again.

The country is England. It is 1997.

‘Kay Adshead's angry stripped-down script bleeds humanity... Words in Adshead's hands are bullets’ – The Independent

Bites

Seven courses, one meal

Moving from the biggest democracy on the planet to the newest, Bites takes us back to Afghanistan via Texas. In the last diner at the end of a world ravaged by war, a menu of love, death and revenge is served by the 'hired help'. Seven courses make for a poetic feast of universal tales looking back to the forgotten war and forward to a nightmarish future.

‘Imaginative, fluent, funny and hideous  ... a world in which the relationships between the characters are vicious and cannibalistic, and people are all so much meat ... ’ – The Evening Standard 

Bones

At night, a young black boy is "questioned" by a white South African policeman. A terrible incident and the truth is buried. Thirty six years later, when the truth is dug up, a tortured Jennifer watches over her dying husband. But does her maid Beauty have the power to "save" him, and is the price of remembering a dreadful secret one that Jennifer is prepared to pay?

Bones is a ruthless excavation of modern South Africa, and in an age of retribution and revenge, it is an anthem for hope.

‘Disturbing power, a compelling vividness and a wicked wit… effective and compelling’ – The Times

Three Police Statements taken from Working Girls
To Dismember
Performed as Work in Progress at the John Lyon Theatre

In 2010, Mama Quilla established a partnership with The City Lit, Keeley Street, Drama Department. 

Working Girls is in development and ongoing.

Breaking
Performed as Work in Progress at the John Lyon Theatre

Out of the City Lit partnership, the Mama Quilla Initiative evolved.

Breaking is in development and ongoing.