Layla's Room - Practical Exploration

Learning Outcomes
These resources are designed to continue to embed ideas and dramatic techniques explored in Layla’s Room by Sabrina Mahfouz and assist them in applying these ideas to their own work.

Summary
Students will have the opportunity to develop their skills in numerous areas within the Drama curriculum. The plans aim to enable students to explore the representation of women in the media, devise scenes based on stimuli, work with an extract of text and to write a review. These session plans may be adapted or combined to suit the needs of your pupils. Extracts of the script are included and the full play text is available direct from the Theatre Centre website.

Layla’s Room by Sabrina Mahfouz
Respect women, respect girls. Respect yourselves. Remember you are everyone who’s gone before you and you are nobody that has ever been, so make it count, make it special, make a difference, make people listen, love the women who have loved you and watch us make the world move to a better place.

For Layla, every day is a battleground.

The pay gap, the thigh gap, over-sexed pop and selfies that are photoshopped – they’re just part of the world she lives in.

But that world is about to change.

While breaking out of her bedroom – and with drama, comedy, poetry and music as her weapons – Layla breaks down and makes sense of the realities, difficulties and absurdities of teenage life in the UK today.

Collected from a bespoke national survey, the voices of a thousand UK teens are brought to life in Layla. Their ambitions, concerns, role-models and regrets are woven together by award-winning Sabrina Mahfouz and theatre company Theatre Centre, offering a hard-hitting, yet hopeful, story.

Layla’s Room received its world premiere at Redbridge Drama Centre on 15 September 2016 in a production by Theatre Centre. It is ideal for students and young performers between 16 and 18 years old.