Egusi Soup is currently being cast for a production in May and June 2012.

A funny and poignant play from Menagerie Associate Writer and Bruntwood Prize Winner, Janice Okoh.  As the Anyias, a British-Nigerian family, pack their suitcases and prepare to head home to Lagos for a memorial service in honour of the late Mr Anyia, they soon realise they will need to get rid of some excess baggage first!  A fast, furious and funny new family drama about inter-generational and cross- cultural relationships. Contains plenty of spicy bits…

Egusi Soup started life with Menagerie with a reading at Sparks; it then premiered as a script-in-hand performance at Hotbed in July 2009 and in October 2009 embarked on tour in a co-production with Eastern Angles.  For 2012, Egusi Soup will be brought to life once again with a co-production between Menagerie and Soho Theatre and in association with the Mercury Theatre, Colchester.  It will preview at the Mumford Theatre in Cambridge.

Reviews

The play has all the ingredients it needs to succeed – jealousy, regret, deceit, pathos and humour. Add to that a subtle flavour of religion and superstition and you have a very fine egusi soup – a Nigerian culinary speciality that gives the piece its title.

Carol Twinch, BBC Suffolk Online, click here to read the whole review

 

…the best performances come from the three women. From her first entrance, high-heeled and business-suited, Karlina Grace offers us both the brittle shell that is the outward Anne and the desperate unhappiness within it. Quieter in her troubles but no less intense is Gracy Goldman as her sister, an acceptor of what life throws at her until she reaches her own point of no return. Taiwo Ajai-Lycett is the matriarch, a woman who can blend acceptance of what cannot be changed, not to mention possessing a shrewd sense of proper priorities, with an apparent country simplicity which annoys her daughters just as much as she enjoys displaying it. It’s a bravura performance which anchors the play. And the soup of the title? That really is revealed to have a very special flavour.

Anne Morley-Priestman, What’s On Stage, click here for the full review