Scenes from 77* Years (Staged Reading)

Cast includes:

Hemi Yeroham

Laila Alj

Sarah Slimani

Dana Haqjoo

Eleanor Nawal

Lara Sawalha

Zed Josef

Hannah Khalil (Playwright) is Writer in Residence at Bristol Old Vic (2025-2050). Recent work includes critically acclaimed My English Persian Kitchen which had a sell out run at the Traverse as part of the Edinburgh Festival in August 2024, then transferred to Soho Theatre, London. It returns to London in Autumn 2025 followed by a UK and Irish tour.

Hannah was the 2022 Resident Writer at Shakespeare’s Globe, while there the Globe produced three of her plays: Hakawatis: Women of the Arabian Nights, Henry VIII and The Fir Tree (2021 and 2022). Hannah’s other stage plays include A Museum in Baghdad (Royal Shakespeare Company) which marked the first play by a woman of Arab heritage on a main stage at the RSC,  Interference (National Theatre of Scotland) and the critically acclaimed Scenes from 68* Years - shortlisted for the James Tait Black Award (Arcola Theatre, London, 2016). Hannah was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is an Associate Artist of Shakespeare’s Globe.

Chris White (Director) is a dramaturg and director specialising in international collaborations, Shakespeare, new plays, and projects with young people. He is an Associate Dramaturg for Paines Plough and an Associate Learning Practitioner for The Royal Shakespeare Company, for whom he leads projects and performances across the UK and internationally; including The Wood of Words or In Every Leaf, which he co-wrote and directed for the 2023 RSC Playmaking Festival. His most recent production is My English Persian Kitchen by Hannah Khalil, which sold out at The Traverse Theatre as part of their Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2024 programme, and will return this autumn to Soho Theatre before a short UK and Irish tour.

For Soho Theatre he co-led Writer’s Lab for ten years, developing plays by the UK's best emerging playwrights, as well as directing Soho Theatre Young Playwrights Festival. Other productions of new work in the UK include Chippy, Acorn Theatre, Penzance and Cornwall tour, The Lighthouse Keeper's Son, Beckett Archive, Reading University; Nothing in a Butterfly, Synergy Theatre/Omnibus; Gutted, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury and UK tour; Trouble and Wonder, RSC; Booby’s Bay, London/Bristol/Cornwall; bottled, Vault Festival; Scenes from 68* Years, Arcola Theatre; The Sale, Chapter Arts, Cardiff; The Water When it Burns, Hampstead Theatre,

International productions include The Truth, La Virgule, Lille; Fewer Emergencies, Teatro Litta, Milan, Hard Places, Prithvi Theatre, Mumbai and National Tour; The Suicide, Teatro Della Contraddizione, Milan, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, National Centre for Performing Arts, Beijing, currently touring across China. His production of Trouf, co-directed in Tunisia in 2019 for Nabeul Performing Arts Centre, premiered in the UK as part of the 2023 Shubbak Festival.