Connections 2024: Age is Revolting

Performed by Queens Park High School

Choir is for mad old people, right?

When a group of school kids rebel against their boring music lesson they hit the wrong note and magically transform into their 80 year-old selves… and now live in a care home.

Suddenly age, and their understanding of it, feels very relevant as they begin to confusedly navigate their way back to the present; no longer older, but maybe just a little wiser.

Abi Zakarian is an award-winning British-Armenian playwright born and raised in Derby, now based in London. Some of her plays include: Lullaby at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, Found, produced by 45North for their ‘Written on the Waves’ series of audio plays; Perfect Myth Allegory at Jermyn Street Theatre for the ‘15 Heroines’ series; I Am Karyan Ophidian for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe and A Thousand Yards at Southwark Playhouse. Her play Fabric won a Scotsman Fringe First award, later touring and also at Soho Theatre, and she won a Vault Festival People’s Choice Award for I Have a Mouth and I Will Scream. Her play Mountain Warfare was a finalist in the 2021/22 Women’s Prize for Playwriting, and her play Worthy Women was longlisted for the Women’s Prize in 2023/24.

Along with the playwrights Morgan Lloyd Malcolm and Sampira Al-Fihri, she is a co-founder of the horror theatre company Terrifying Women, and she also created and hosts the UK Armenian Creatives group. Abi is currently shooting her first short film, Pomegranate, and is under commission with Derby Theatre among others.