DRUM
By Jacob Roberts-Mensah🏆 WINNER OF THE 2024 EDINBURGH UNTAPPED AWARD
âA civilization flourishes when men plant trees under which they themselves never sit. What you need to understand is, Ghana is home.â
As the afternoon sun hits BBC Broadcasting House in London, photographer James Barnor meets broadcaster Mike Eghan for the very first time. Thrown together by lives built far from home, the two rising Ghanaian creatives must manoeuvre through their perception of identity, success, assimilation and home.
This joyful and poignant fiction fuses storytelling, music and dance with archival material to capture a unique snapshot of London in the swinging sixties.
DRUM is a new play from award-nominated writer Jacob Roberts Mensah (DEM TIMES, Our Day) and Sarah Amankwah (recent acting credits include Lion King, West End; Black Earth Rising, Netflix; Henry V, Shakespeareâs Globe) making her directorial debut.
DRUM premiered with a critically acclaimed sold-out run at Omnibus Theatre in 2022.
Photo by Guy J. Saunders
A delightful, joyous and lively celebration of Ghanaian culture and music
Arts Hub
A fantastic study of identity
Fest
A sensitive story elevated further by the brilliant actors who command the stage with skill and confidence
EdFest Mag
DRUM is presented by Our Day Media in association with Omnibus Theatre.
OUR DAY MEDIA
Our Day is a production company focused on creating and producing stories that highlight the experiences of the Ghanaian community in the UK Diaspora and on the continent. Our Day produced DEM TIMES, a successful fiction podcast show which has been nominated for a UK Audio Production award as well as an AMBIE and British Podcast Cast Award. Our play DRUM was written on the Soho Writers Lab and further developed at Camden Peoples Theatre and Omnibus Theatre.
OMNIBUS THEATRE
Omnibus Theatre is a multi-award-winning independent theatre in Clapham, South London. Finalist in the Fringe Theatre of the Year 2020 and 2023 The Stage Awards, Off-West End Award winner 2018 and 2020, and recipient of the Peter Brook/Royal Court Theatre Support Award in 2016. The heart of the organisationâs ambitious programme lies in classics re-imagined, modern revivals and new
writing. Omnibus Theatre also provides a platform for LGBTQ+ work and aims to give voice to the underrepresented and challenge perceptions. Since opening in 2013 notable in-house productions include Woyzeck (2013), Macbeth (2014), Colour (2015), Mule (2016), Spring Offensive (2017), Zeraffa Giraffa (2017), Queens of Sheba (2019), The Little Prince (2019), RICE! (2021), The Human Connection (2021), The Girl Who Was Very Good At Lying (2021), FIJI (2022), SAD (2022) and DRUM (2022), COMPOSITOR E (2023), ICE AT THE END OF THE WORLD (2024).
ON STAGE
Photos by Dan Tsantilis
