The Burial by Bola Agbaje to premiere at the Albany Theatre

Bola Agbaje

The Burial, a new play by Olivier Award winning playwright Bola Agbaje, will run between Thursday 2nd and Saturday 11th May at the Albany Theatre. The Burial is a lively new satire which explores how the conflicting traditions and religious tensions of one family reveal an unlikely respect for their Nigerian and British-Nigerian cultures. 

Funmi has it all: a career, doting husband and a comfortable life in London… until the day her father dies and his two Nigerian wives arrive in a flurry of designer shoes and polished fingernails to clash over his burial arrangements. Born a Muslim, married a Christian and with new-found Buddhist beliefs, Funmi is forced to confront the past and her own faith to end the war over her father’s body. 

Bola Agbaje won the Laurence Olivier Award for outstanding achievement in an affiliated theatre for her first play, Gone too Far. She received an Evening Standard Award nomination for most promising playwright in 2008 and has seen her other plays, including Belong and Off The Endz, performed in major theatres across London. The playwright-turned-filmmaker has also adapted a screenplay from her first play, Gone Too Far, with a release planned for autumn 2013.

Bola Agbaje's first play Gone Too Far premièred at the Royal Court Theatre in February 2007 and won the Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliated Theatre. Due to its success, Gone Too Far was revived a number of times in 2008, at the Royal Court Theatre, the Albany and Hackney Empire, and Bola is currently adapting the play for film with support from the UK Film Council. In 2008 her second play opened the Tiata Delights season at the Almeida Theatre and she was nominated for the Evening Standard Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright. In 2009 she was commissioned by the Tricycle Theatre alongside Roy Williams and Kwame Kwei-Armah to be part of the "Not Black and White" season with Detaining Justice. Bola’s second play for the Royal Court, Off the Endz, opened in February 2010.

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