Finalist for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Playwriting, King Troll (The Fawn) is a dark and otherworldly thriller about two South Asian sisters, desperate to escape the border regime without losing their humanity. Is that even possible on this island? A dystopian exploration of migrant experiences in all their complexity.
This world premiere production stars Diyar Bozkurt (The Turkish Detective), Ayesha Dharker (Coronation Street), Zainab Hasan (Antigone, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre), Dominic Holmes (Black Superhero, Royal Court) and Safiyya Ingar (The Witcher).
This play is Sonali Bhattacharyya and Milli Bhatia’s third collaboration as writer and director, following Chasing Hares (Young Vic/Theatre Uncut) – winner of the Theatre Uncut Political Playwriting Award and the Sonia Friedman Production Award, and Liberation Squares (Brixton House), nominated for two OffWestEnd Awards. The duo first worked together on a Kali workshop and reading of King Troll (The Fawn) in 2021 and are delighted to be able to share a full production with audiences this Halloween season.
Riya and Nikita navigate the increasingly authoritarian island where they live in wildly different ways. Insecure, stateless, both desperate for somewhere to call ‘home’. Riya is offered the chance to create an advocate in the form of a homunculus, or fawn, and sees a chance to elevate herself above the cruelty meted out to others. Nikita tries to keep her saviour complex in check as she negotiates the challenges and hypocrisy of the third sector, where she supports migrant teenagers. Her deep connection with one client forces her to confront the limitations of her work. King Troll is about the troll that lives within all of us – whispering ‘me, not us’, and definitely ‘me’ first.
Speaking about the production, Sonali Bhattacharyya says “For the first few drafts, I tried to reflect the increasingly racist and authoritarian changes to immigration legislation in the story of Riya and Nikita, but each time I came to a rewrite, things had grown worse than I could have imagined. So I decided to push the story beyond day to day reality and fully embrace the horror. That’s when the fawn, the king of all trolls, was born.”
King Troll (the Fawn) is brought to NDT by Kali Theatre, who have been developing and presenting thought provoking contemporary theatre by women writers of South Asian descent for over 30 years.
