About

About Mama Quilla

Mama Quilla Productions was founded in 1999 by Kay Adshead and the late Lucinda Gane to make bold, politically engaged theatre and mixed-media performance from a female viewpoint.

The company creates work that brings neglected human rights issues into the light, gives a platform to urgent and controversial subjects, and provokes social debate. Its aim is not only to respond to the moment, but to create work that endures: work that can be published, revived, reinterpreted and performed again.

Mama Quilla is especially interested in stories, cultures and experiences that are too often pushed to the margins. The company explores other cultures, particularly non-European cultures, challenges stereotyping and prejudice, and makes visible people and experiences that are often ignored.

The work is adventurous in text, form and setting. Mama Quilla moves between mainstream theatre, high-profile public performance and mixed-media work incorporating video, dance, music and visual art, often in unconventional spaces. It embraces experiment, uncertainty and risk.

The company also seeks to use the talent of hugely experienced but under-employed older theatre practitioners, Our special interest and passion is to reach out to working class women with no conventional. theatre training background and to take theatre back into the community.

Mama Quilla tackles issues traditionally considered of special interest to women, and issues previously assumed to be of no interest to women. Its work asks who is seen, who is heard, who is excluded, and what theatre can do to change things for the better.

Aims

Mama Quilla aims to:

  • spotlight neglected human rights issues
  • create work that provides a platform for current controversial issues and provokes social debate
  • create work that endures, to be published and performed again and again
  • explore other cultures, especially non-European cultures
  • exploit the talent of hugely experienced but under-employed older theatre practitioners
  • tackle the experimental and unknown
  • be adventurous with text and form
  • move between mainstream high-profile theatre and mixed-media performance in unconventional spaces
  • challenge stereotyping
  • challenge prejudice
  • tackle issues traditionally considered of special interest to women
  • tackle issues previously considered of no interest to women
  • take theatre back into the community
  • make invisible people visible
  • change things for the better

Executive Board

  • Artistic Director and Executive Producer: Kay Adshead
  • Associate Director: Kully Thiarai
  • Technical Director: Andrew Locke
  • Young People’s Director: Jodie Jameson
  • Pauline Moran
  • Sarah Niles
  • Lauren Cato
  • Josie Welcome
  • Olusola Oyeleye
  • Sue Phelan
  • Cherie Hughes

Kay Adshead

Kay Adshead is a writer, theatre maker, performer, filmmaker, and producer. She trained at RADA as an actress, winning the Emile Littler Award for Outstanding Talent. Leading roles in TV, film, and theatre include Cathy in the BBC classic serial Wuthering Heights, Linda in Mike Leigh’s Kiss of Death, Sue McKenna in Film on Four’s Acceptable Levels, Tanzi in Trafford Tanzi at the Mermaid, (learning to wrestle for the role.) She sung the role of Clara Twain in Adrian Mitchel’s White Suit Blues and played Betty in Stephen Lowe’s Touched, both  productions at the Old Vic. She played Moll Gromer in Philip Martin’s Thee and Me at the RNT.

She has written over 25 plays, and has been published by Methuen, Faber and Faber, and Oberon, with commissions or productions at the Royal National Theatre, the Royal Court, the Young Vic, The Lyric Hammersmith( main House) The Cockpit, the Bush, the Arcola, Soho Theatre, and many more. Awards include Fringe First, Adelaide Fringe Sensation Award, Adelaide Best Fringe Performance Award, M.E.N. best Fringe Performance, Scene Savers Best Play 2023 for The Last little Girl, and she won a Houston Purposeful Artist Award for the same play*.* She has been a Susan Smith Blackburn finalist three times for Thatcher’s Women, The Bogus Woman, and Bites. She was nominated for an E.M.M.A and Encore Magazine best Play of the Year, for Animal.  Alex Sierz of The Tribune describes her as” the great survivor”, and The Times reviewed her play I am Sad you are dead Mrs. T for Theatre503 as “a poetic mortar bomb.”

In 1999, with Lucinda Gane, she co-founded multi-award-winning theatre company Mama Quilla. She has devised and directed more than 10 large-cast experimental and live art, site-specific projects, often working within hard-to-reach communities creating empowering performance within vulnerable and disadvantaged communities.

Her experimental film bricolage Stormy – The Opera was a finalist in the 57 year old WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival, an award winner in the WRPN Women’s International Film Festival, and won the Kudos Award 2023 in the Depth of Field International Film Festival. PANGOLIA, a film made from The Pangolin Project produced  at the Alexandra Palace in 2022, won Best Experimental in the Miami Indie Film Awards and Madrid Art House Film Festival, Both films have been Official Selections over 15 times at international film festivals. She is currently editing a short film, Sea Glass, and has completed filming The Silent Lyre shot in Berlin.

Her short screenplay Teratoma is in development and so is a new full length play, as yet untitled.

Current work includes a collaboration with 10 other filmmakers, Democracy vs. Donald J. Trump, and an experimental theatre project, Alive But Not Living.