1001 Nights

Devised and directed by Transport Theatre's artistic director Douglas Rintoul, this production premiered at the Unicorn last year and returns as part of a nationwide tour.

Based around the timeless folk tales of The Arabian Nights, the enduring Islamic tales are collected and brought to life for a modern young audience by Shahrazad, a young girl torn between her home in Syria and her new life in the UK. Using everyday objects, the bookish Shaharazad fashions saucepans into crowns, old pipes into enchanted telescopes and a mop into a magic carpet to transport us into an imagined and fantastical world of kings viziers and jinns.

Director Douglas Rintoul uses the power of storytelling to examine complex subjects such as the passage of time, the concept of distance and our affinity to places.

Names of the places in the stories that Shahrazad weaves will have new associations for audiences today: Basra, Baghdad, Mosul, Aleppo, Damascus, and ongoing events in the Middle East have shaped and informed Transport's adaptation.