HACKNEY STREETS A play for voices by Michael Rosen Directed by Christopher Preston

 At the Rosemary Branch Theatre 2 Shepperton Road London N1 3DT

Tues 28 Oct – Sat 1 Nov @ 7.30pm Sun 2 Nov @ 4.00pm

Tickets £6.50 (concs £5)

24-hour Box Office 020 7704 6665

Soundscapes of poetry and prose conjure up the streets of Hackney past and present. Hackney Streets was written for Write to Ignite 2007 and given one public performance by the students at Brooke House. This is its first professional production.

Michael Rosen is a writer and broadcaster, poet and performer, best known as a prolific writer of children’s books. He is currently children’s laureate.

In 2007 Michael was appointed Hackney Poet Laureate for Write to Ignite. As a Hackney resident, he has an inexhaustible knowledge of local literature, contemporary and historical.

For more info on Michael - http://www.michaelrosen.co.uk/index.html

Hackney Streets is an auditory extravaganza where four choruses surround the audience in a live quadraphonic experience, taking them on a journey though time and Hackney. The cast of characters includes: Shakespeare, James Burbage, Parkes – the inventor of plastic, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Anna Swell, Morris Beckman and the street cries of Ridley Road market. Poetry highlights are: “Evening falls between the trees”, The Turkish Baber and the much loved “Number 38 Bus”.

Review from the Round Chapel performance in 2007….a microcosm of north-east London: the throaty call of the market trader; playground rhymes and football chants; the disembodied voice of a Turkish barber and the stench of “ripe armpit” on the bus. The fast pace flitted from comedy to frank flashes of the darker side of our multicultural history, of anti-Semitism and a city that was once “no place for a coloured man”. Tanith Lindon

http://www.rosemarybranch.co.uk/2008theatre_branchingout.asp