Celebrate Your Rights!

I have to begin this by saying that I literally cannot keep up with the theatre feed from The Guardian. They are by far the most prolific feed on my Google Reader. Perhaps this is because the UK has more theatre than anywhere else that my Google Reader feeds cover...Hmm, chew on that. Anyway...



British playwright Julian Armitstead's After the Accident will receive three staged readings today in the UK. The play, which is about a mother and father confronting a teenage joyrider responsible for the death of their daughter, is this year's winner of the Protect the Human prize awarded by Amnesty International and iceandfire theatre company. The readings are just part of nationwide events marking the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. According to Amnesty, Armitstead's play embraces "dignity and worth of the person" and "duty to the community," both components of the Declaration.

The Protect The Human award began last year in an effort to create "imaginative and excellent theatre that illustrates human rights issues." This is what Natasha Tripney had to say about it all in her blog at The Guardian:

Amnesty is involved in projects across the arts, but theatre has always proved to be particularly adept at exploring human rights issues. Theatre awakens and connects in a way that simply reading a slew of harrowing statistics often doesn't...A good play can make the issues real, make them breathe, give them human heart and narrative. Theatre can get people fired up, can drive the desire to act in its audience, to change things both in their immediate world and more generally.

I couldn't have put it better myself...