"Aunti-ji - noun. a term sometimes used to address women older than oneself. Ji is traditionally used after someone's name to show respect, mainly by the communities of the Indian sub-continent. "
Somewhere in the city live three elderly, South Asian auntijies who have found themselves together in a refuge for abused women, empty of memories and bereft of their families and friends. Nearby, a new Indian bride has arrived in the country only to find herself in a place that she is utterly unprepared for.
"The Usual Auntijies" is a bitter-sweet new comic-drama that visits the lives of four women as they embark on an inspiring, emotional and comic journey to overcome the past abuse and rediscover their sense of life, love and happiness.
Exploring ideas of family and the cultural differences that exist between the East and West, the Auntijies struggle with popular Western culture and provide a hybrid cultural context which amusingly sits alongside the women's otherness and past pain.
"The Usual Auntijies" is a celebration of all women of a particular age whose desires and struggles are too often forgotten.

This brilliant new collection of ten plays for young people will prove indispensable to schools, colleges and youth theatre groups. Specially commissioned by the National Theatre for the Connections Festival 2012 involving 200 schools and youth theatre groups across the UK and Ireland, each play is accompanied by production notes and exercises. Power struggles, rites of passage, love and forbidden relationships are some of the rich themes that run through the 2012 cycle of plays. Some are deeply funny, some are provocative and some reflective; and one has really catchy songs! For the 2012 Festival, the anthology has an international feel and offers a window on the world. It includes from Australia a play based on a nineteenth century court case in which a teenage girl was falsely convicted; from Brazil a drama about young lovers doomed to tragedy; set in Russia, a play exploring differing attitudes to National Service and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991; a drama about students' rights to an education and the Cultural Revolution of 1966 in China; and a comedy involving a group of Irish country girls travelling to London to audition for the X-Factor.