Out of the Margins

“I wanted the start to be like an orgasm”. 

"Scheherazade is the main character in One Thousand and One Nights," describes Hannah Khalil's inspiration for Shakespeare's Globe website. "The story goes that King Shahryār’s wife is unfaithful to him, so he resolves to marry a new virgin every day and to have her beheaded the next morning as his revenge on all womenkind. Enter Scheherazade, a woman with a plan – she agrees to marry the King, hoping her exciting tales will keep the monarch hooked night after night, saving her and all the other women in the kingdom from execution. A germ of an idea formed which led to this play, Hakawatis, which I pitched to the Globe’s Artistic Director, Michelle Terry: ‘What if Scheherazade isn’t the brilliant storyteller of fable – what if she’s good, but not as good as she thinks? Well, all the women behind her in line for the King’s bloody wed-bed-and-behead revenge will be wanting her to succeed. So what if they got together and started writing stories for Scheherazade?… Scheherazade’s writers room'." 

Signed by the playwright on the title page, this lot has hundreds of annotations over 69 pages. Find out what makes Hannah Khalil metaphorically orgasm on stage; how she merges Shakespeare, The Arabian Nights and old Palestinian tales; and how the play’s actors put a spell on her to overcome a Covid shut down. Hannah Khalil also offers an insight into her working relationships with some of the other writers and members of the cast.