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Approaching Empty

On tour

Forget friendship, this is business. In a scruffy minicab office, Mansha decides it’s time to create his own destiny and offers to buy the business from his lifelong friend Raf. As the realities of the state of the company slowly unravel, these two best friends must confront the difficulties of going into business with those closest to them. Read more …

Set in Northern England in the aftermath of Margaret Thatcher’s death, Approaching Empty is a razor-sharp new drama by award-winning playwright Ishy Din (Snookered, Best New Play at Manchester Theatre Awards), which lays bare the everyday struggles of a post-industrial generation of British men.

Tamasha is Britain’s leading touring theatre company producing new plays that put diverse artists centre-stage. During its 30 year history successes like East Is East, Snookered and My Name Is… have won acclaim from critics and audiences alike. 


The critical consensus

Quite deliberately set in the aftermath of Margaret Thatcher’s death in 2013 and the blanket TV coverage it provoked, Din’s play become a terrier-like microcosm of the sort of free market capitalism she championed.

****(*)Neil Cooper, Coffee-Table Notes, 06/03/2019

Although some of the performances are overwrought, and Din's script can be ponderous and obvious in its intentions, the competing visions of society and masculinity – which rotate around money, stability, success and social appearance – are served with deft characterisations, lifting the production above simplistic political rhetoric into a sometimes moving and frequently thoughtful examination of life lived at the margins of entrepreneurial ambition.

***(*)(*)Gareth K Vile, The List, 08/03/2019


Features about Approaching Empty

Ishy Din on Approaching Empty.

Gareth K Vile, The List, 27/02/2019

Where and when?

Tron Theatre, Glasgow on Tuesday March 5, 2019. More info: www.tron.co.uk

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh from Thursday March 7, 2019, until Saturday March 9, 2019.

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