Ursula Rani Sarma

Clean Break is a British theatre company set up in 1979 by two women in prison. It exists to tell the stories of women with experience of the criminal justice system and to transform women’s lives through theatre. Over 40 years, Clean Break has commissioned some of the most progressive and brilliant women writers to write ground-breaking plays, alongside developing the writing skills of the women they work with in its London studios and in prisons. This is a collection of monologues from this canon. Rebel Voices: Monologues for Women by Women celebrates the opportunities inherent when women represent themselves. Offering female performers a diverse set of monologues reflecting a range of characters in age, ethnicity and lived experience, the material is drawn from a mix of published and unpublished works. This book is for any performer who does not see themselves represented in mainstream plays, for lovers of radical women’s theatre and for rebels everywhere who believe that the act of speaking and being heard can create change.

Five characters share a common thread: Joanne. But it's not about her. It's about Stella, whose tomorrow is as far away as winter from summer. It's the way Grace finds her song on the footpath between two cars. It's about Alice's MBA wasted on plugging holes, Kath's patients crawling alongside her after the night shift and it's Becky caught in the crosshairs of what's best and what's right for her students. But what about her? What about Joanne? In Joanne, five of the most exciting voices in theatre explore the pressures on our public services as one young woman buckles under pressures of her own. The play comprises five interconnected short plays for a solo performer, written by Deborah Bruce, Theresa Ikoko, Laura Lomas, Chino Odimba and Ursula Rani Sarma. Commissioned by Clean Break, Joanne premiered at Latitude Festival in 2015, before transferring to Soho Theatre, London.

The script for the stage production of the bestselling Khaled Hosseini novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, as adapted by playwright Ursula Rani Sarma. Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss, and by fate. As they endure the ever-escalating dangers around them--in their home, as well as in the streets of Kabul--they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, playwright Ursula Rani Sarma reimagines Hosseini's novel to show how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival. A stunning accomplishment, this reimagination of A Thousand Splendid Suns is a haunting, heartbreaking, compelling production about unlikely friendship and indestructible love. This adaptation was first performed by the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco in February 2017.

A brave and brilliant new play about art, fame, and death. Opened at the Traverse Theatre in October 2009.

The Magic Tree is an exploration into human behaviour at a time when humanity seems determined to endlessly repeat the mistakes of the past. It looks at why good people are capable of doing bad things and asks if love alone can save us.

In Blue three childhood friends try to make the most of their last year together in the isolated sea-side town in which they live. They study for their leaving certificate, go clubbing in the city and, in an effort to console their sense of worthlessness, they devise a deadly daily ritual. Together they jump from a point where the cliffs are forty feet above the ocean. In those panicked seconds, plummeting at full force towards the sea, Joe, Des and Danny believe that anything is possible, and that their hopes and dreams may just come true. When one day a mysterious black package is washed up on the shore, it seems as if all of those dreams and hopes are within reaching distance. Until everything falls apart and the unthinkable happens. In Touched Cora and Mikey yearn for Dublin, for a life without darkness, without secrets, without despair. Ensnared in their uncle's dishevelled pub in the "crotch of the country", the young sister and brother make a pact to escape. Cora hides the darkest secret of all, one that dates back to the day of her tenth birthday, when the local doctor brought her to the beach alone for ice-cream. Their flight to Dublin leads them straight into the hands of the street wise, money-hungry Macca, to a horrific crime and to a city that was far from the paradise they had dreamt about.