Shappi Khorsandi adapts her novel for the stage | ...as David Baddiel works on a new play, too

Shappi Khorsandi adapts her novel for the stage

...as David Baddiel works on a new play, too

Shappi Khorsandi and David Baddiel are bringing their first plays to London.

Khorsandi has turned her debut novel, Nina Is Not OK, about a teenage alcoholic, into a short production and is developing a full-length adaptation of the entire book.

Nina is one of eight plays being staged at the Tristan Bates Theatre from Tuesday as part of The Feast From The East showcase, all of which debuted at the INK Festival in Suffolk last month.

Khorsandi, who is currently touring her stand-up show Skittish Warrior about life as a club comedian, told Chortle that this 'uplifting' adaptation of Nina is the first step 'into writing a full-length version.

'When I was on I’m A Celeb, I sat on a log quietly for two weeks just looking at my life and thinking I want to write theatre,’ she said. ‘Theatre was my first love.

'Nina Is Not OK has had such a wonderful reaction from readers, from 16-year-old girls to 60-year-old men writing to me and saying how they relate. I want to bring it to life on stage. Many parts of the story were based on my own life and I’m not done with it.

'A lot of readers and critics have spoken about the book being about addiction and coming of age and rape. For me, it was also hugely about being abandoned by a mother so a play is a way for me to make more of her mother and that relationship.'

You can read Chortle's 2016 review of the novel here

Blackadder and Vicar of Dibley creator Richard Curtis is also staging a play as part of the showcase. Another Suitcase Another Hall revolves around a leading lady infuriated by her director and stage crew during a production of Evita. 

Amber Muldoon stars in both plays.

Meanwhile, Baddiel's play God's Dice, a tragi-comedy about religion, physics, sex and social media, is coming to the Soho Theatre in the autumn.

Cast details have yet to be revealed. But at a read-through at the Soho last year, Martin Freeman took the role of theoretical physics lecturer Henry Brook, happily wedded to his wife and his atheist views, until he meets Edie, a student and committed Christian who presents an equation for turning water into wine.

Baddiel has been developing the play for more than three years and told the Guardian in December that 'if you start to understand quantum physics you get a sense of the miraculous.

'It almost takes a leap of faith to believe that what the physics is telling you is true, that the world is actually like this. You feel it can’t possibly be the case that, for example, if an electron is spinning in one direction, another electron that is entangled with it will be spinning in the opposite direction 2,000 light years away.'

Baddiel previously wrote and directed the 2014 musical adaptation of his film The Infidel at London's Theatre Royal Stratford East. Comedian Kev Orkian took the main role, played by Omid Djalili in the film, of a British Muslim who discovers that he was adopted as a child, having been born to a Jewish family.

You can read Chortle's review here.

- by Jay Richardson

Published: 3 May 2019

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