Kaite O’Reilly’s PRIDE AND PROTEST – a powerful examination of disability rights, anger, friendship, and womanhood – was BBC Radio 4’s Drama of the Week (13th May 2022).
Julie McNamara recording PRIDE AND PROTEST. Image credit: Kaite O’Reilly (@kaiteoreilly) on Twitter
Featuring disability actors Sara Beer, Mared Jarman, and Julie McNamara, Kaite’s play tells the story of Seren, a once fierce activist, who is nostalgic for the old campaigns and frontline high jinks. She can’t get over her daughter’s anxiety and apathy about climate change, but is slow to understand the impact of her disability activism on her daughter’s childhood.
PRIDE AND PROTEST is now available on BBC Sounds to stream and download for free.
Praise for PRIDE AND PROTEST:
‘Kaite O’Reilly’s play is a thoughtful, often shaming treatise on the predicament of those disquieted by injustice: to what extent can or should someone dedicate their life to a cause?’ – Jack Seale, The Guardian
‘Although these insights into contemporary disabled life are horrific, O’Reilly carries them with a lightness of touch… Harnessing hope and rage in equal measure, Pride and Protest examines the complex issues of identity politics, disability rights, and queer relationships with a playfulness that can’t help but charm the listener.’ – Natasha Sutton Williams, Disability Arts Online
About Kaite O’Reilly
Kaite is a multi-award winning playwright and radio dramatist.
She has won many awards for her work, including the Peggy Ramsay Award, Manchester Theatre Awards best play of the year, Theatre-Wales Award and the Ted Hughes Award for new works in Poetry for PERSIANS for National Theatre Wales. Widely published and produced, she works internationally.
Her plays are collected in the critically acclaimed ATYPICAL PLAYS FOR ATYPICAL ACTORS, published by Oberon, with the forthcoming THE ‘D’ MONOLOGUES about disability, difference and diversity published to coincide with the UK Autumn tour.
She has written extensively for radio, and she wrote and directed ‘Mouth’, a Screen Gem, back in 2000. Her first screenplay THE ALMOND AND THE SEAHORSE, co-written with Celyn Jones, was produced as a feature film in 2021 starring Rebel Wilson.
A veteran of the disabled peoples’ movement, she received two Cultural Olympiad Commissions for IN WATER I’M WEIGHTLESS, part of the official Olympiad Festival during the 2012 London Paralympics/Olympics. A leading figure in the UK’s disability arts and culture, she is patron of Disability Arts Cymru and DaDaFest.