Catherine O'Shea

If you are interested in performing or purchasing one of Catherine's plays, please contact her via her website here

M0-3/F6-8  

Full length, drama

In January 2010 fifty female asylum seekers’ who were being held in the notorious Yarl’s Wood detention centre went on hunger strike to protest the conditions they and their families had to endure. This ended 5 weeks later with violence and women being removed to Holloway prison. 

Fit for Purpose tells the story of Aruna and Kaela a Somali mother and daughter who are detained in Yarl’s Wood at the start of the strike. The extreme stress of their journey and subsequent mistreatment by the UK Border Agency makes Aruna retreat into herself while her thirteen-year-old daughter tries to understand what is happening.

M2/F2

Full length, drama

‘I’m trying to find out what happens when you throw particles together at faster and faster speeds.’ 

It’s 2012 and the Shard is half completed. Matt, as wing dancer and a nurse and Laura, a particle physicist, hunting for the Higgs Boson particle, are negotiating the world of online dating desperately looking for a connection.

On their first date in Borough High Street there is as park but also catastrophe. We flit back and forth in time, with the Shard at different heights, witnessing the lives of swing dancers and particle physicists at different points of momentum, collision and propulsion. Shards features live lindy hop dancing on stage throughout.

It is a lively and entertaining play about love, loss and dedication. Watch what can happen when you throw particles and very different people together.

M2/F2

Full length, drama

Germany, 1945. The war is over. In the heat of the summer four young people meet in a makeshift office underground, sharing the obsessive pastime of reading and rereading the lists that will tell them who is dead and who may be alive.                     

Whilst they search underground for answers the world above them changes beyond recognition as the Soviet, French, British and American forces carve up the war-ravaged country they once knew.  Borders appear where there where none before and they each find themselves trapped in between imaginary countries as Germany is swallowed up.