New Writing Festival: Daring Pairings

Hampstead Theatre has put on some cracking plays during its 50th anniversary year with some real highlights from the archives but it seems fitting that the celebrations are ending by focussing on a new generation of writers. At the heart of Daring Pairings, Hampstead's third festival of new writing, is a bold, funny debut play from Atiha Sen Gupta, who has risen up from within the theatre's youth company heat&light. What Fatima Did... explores the consequences of one girl turning up at the start of a new school year, wearing the hijab among the secular trends of her classmates. Alongside this world premiere, Daring Pairings presents five unique collaborations to inspire and foster new writing. A group of writers linked to the theatre come together to create a new play; heat&light work with an established writer on their own invention; there's music theatre from a partnership with Central School of Speech and Drama in Noctropia, commissioned in 2003, and other innovative approaches to new writing come from edgy theatre companies The Factory and Nabokov. If you want to be at the forefront of what's new and happening in theatre, this is for you.