Kassandra can see into the future…can her millions of followers believe her?
Kassandra is a Nigerian princess turned reality TV star with a social conscience. She has hot pepper to share with the world, but can the world take the heat? Performed live online by Creation’s rep company, this new adaptation by Funlola Olufunwa shakes up ancient myths, pop music, social media culture and even Barbie, and gives us a wahala-filled future fable.
On her journey Kassandra addresses big issues including the climate crisis, mental health, world ecology and sexual harassment.
TICKETS £10 per person BOOK HERE – Keeping up with Kassandra | Creation Theatre Company
WATCH TRAILER HERE – https://www.facebook.com/CreationTheatre/
What Funlola say about Keeping up with Kassandra in her own words
A devastated planet…
Multiple pandemics…
Mourning and grief as it transpires that everything counts for nothing if we
can’t keep the world turning…
Kassandra can see it all in the future. But she is grappling with her own trauma
as well as collective trauma stemming from misogynoir.
How relevant is foresight anyway, when nobody can accept that the current
state of affairs is dire? Or see that Kassandra’s very life is in the balance?
The original Kassandra, from Homer’s Iliad and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, is a
Trojan princess who, having been given the ability to prophesy by the god
Apollo, is subsequently cursed by him to never be believed in her predictions
when she decides not to entertain his sexual desires. She foresees the fall of
Troy but is disbelieved. When it does happen, she is captured and killed. This is
why today, we use the term ‘Cassandra’ to refer to anyone whose prophecies
of doom are unheeded (Collins English Dictionary).
Keeping up with Kassandra synthesises much of the information we have
around the climate crisis in 2021, as the boundaries of term must be examined
when research and data is channelled through the truth-teller that is Nigerian
royal turned reality TV star, Princess Kassandra of Lagos state. In this case,
climate crisis must not only refer to coastlines clogged with plastic and harmful
C02 emissions, but to race relations, mental health and to our relationship with
the news.
About Funlola Olufunwa
Funlola OLUFUNWA is a writer, actor and teacher who has been active since 2005. In 2009 she joined Barefaced Theatre, which showcased a devised piece: Mad Women in Attics at the New Wimbledon Theatre during the Fresh Ideas Season in 2011. Funlola was a dramaturg on this project.
In 2016 Funlola showcased thirty minutes of her musical Deborah, for which she wrote the book, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as part of a cabaret style show, West End Has Faith: Musicals Retold.
In Autumn 2016 Funlola was longlisted for a writers’ prize, which encouraged her to develop her triptych A Cord of Three Strands that started out as a response to the death of African American civil rights activist Sandra Bland. This was read at a Women at RADA night in 2018 and developed for a staged reading at the RADA Festival in July 2019.
Funlola is an associate acting teacher at LAMDA where she recently co-led research and development of a new play by an associate writer with the MFA acting students. She enjoys all the varied aspects of creating content, like R&D and furthermore, she is delighted to have written her first digital play for Creation Theatre.
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