Theatre503 have announced the cast and creative team for 2023 Theatre503 International Playwriting Award finalist Nia Akilah Robinson’s debut play The Great Privation: How to flip ten cents into a dollar, which plays at the venue from 14 May-1 June.

The production features Ella Dacres (The Book of Dust), Jack Gouldbourne (Masters of the Air), Romeo Mika (Peter Pan Goes Wrong) and Sydney Sainté (UK stage debut).

Directed by JMK Award winner and Theatre503’s Carne Associate Kalungi Ssebandeke, the creative team includes set and costume designer Ruth Badila, lighting designer Chuma Emembolu, sound designer José Guillermo Puello, movement director Yemurai Zvaraya, and casting director Fran Cattaneo.

“So why should I sacrifice my husband's body, for medicine he/me/or my child wouldn’t receive?

Just look at the outbreak that happened during the summer.

Black people helped White people, we became bleeders, nurses, grave diggers because White people convinced us that we weren’t susceptible to getting it.

Then Black people got Cholera.

Who was there to help us?

No one.”

Set in Pennsylvania and shifting between the early 1800s and the present day, The Great Privation: How to flip ten cents into a dollar is a stunning and profound play that explores the impact of grave robbing for medical science, and the historical disruption of Black bodies that never got their rest. Timelines collide and secrets and lives become buried and revealed, as a reckoning comes to call: the roots to our ancestors are not as long as we may think.

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