Juniper's Whitening: AND Victimese

Description

Two plays exploring the pain of living and the difficulty of dying by a sensational new writer Juniper's Whitening "Tell me this - is it true that if you make someone die, and they come out the other side, it doesn't matter? I'm sure something clung to Lazarus. Something must've shone through him." In Aleph, Beth and Juniper's nightmare house, kindness is entrapment, and resurrection is a weapon. Aleph love/hates Beth, Beth love/hates Aleph, and all Juniper knows is that Beth can't seem to stop being murdered. One thing above all: none of them must look out of the window. Victimese "I was thinking, Eve, that you need to touch bottom - just so you know you can do it. So you know it's not that difficult; so you know that you don't have to tunnel far; so you know that you're not that actually as deep as you think you are." Eve is unable to leave her student room but unable to bear staying in it. In harming herself she hopes to demonstrate her courage and independence to both herself and her friends. But her sister's arrival and need for her friendship forces her to face painful truths and to examine whether it is possible to temper emotional courage with the humanity to give and ask for aid.

Helen Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria in 1984 and moved to London when she was four. She wrote The Icarus Girl while she was still at school, studying for her A levels, and is now a student of Social and Political Sciences at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Helen Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria in 1984 and has lived in London for most of her life. She wrote her first novel, The Icarus Girl, while she was still at school, her second novel, The Opposite House, was published in 2007, her third, White is for Witching, in 2009 and her fourth, Mr Fox, in 2011. Her plays include Juniper's Whitening and Victimese, both of which were performed by fellow students while she was studying at Cambridge University.