Naomi Westerman

Welcome to the Happy Death Club--we have good snacks, great films, and tons of famous members Playwright Naomi Westerman was an anthropologist, studying death rituals around the world, when her whole family died. Suddenly, 'end of life' was transformed from an abstract, academic concept into something deeply, painfully personal. She became fascinated by loss and grief, the multiple ways we experience it across cultures, history, and art.In Happy Death Club, Westerman examines the many faces of death in her own life and in cultures across the world. From expensive coffins and unconventional burials, to horror movies and true crime, what does our treatment of death and dying have to tell us about how we live our lives? What makes a 'good death'? And who owns our bodies before and after we die?This is a frank, curious and darkly humorous look at one person's journey through grief, and what lies beyond.

Naomi Westerman was an anthropology student studying death rituals when her whole family died, turning death from the academic to the deeply personal. She struggled with grief and talking about, particularly as a young woman, realising while death is everywhere in our culture, grief is harder to find in specialist ways.

Charles Dickens' London is reimagined for the 21st century.Twenty-four hours in the life of a city that has 371 people in every square kilometer, where every street and square shelters heroes and villains, emotional turmoil, violent allegiances, adventures, the remarkable and the everyday.Olivier Award-winning playwright James Graham forges a uniquely crowd-sourced play, incorporating scenes by emerging writers into his own sweeping narrative. Dickens' panoply of London and Londoners, his big characters and fantastic stories in Sketches by Boz are updated for the modern age, incorporating the broadest range of voices from across the community in a theatrical whirligig of wonder and imagination.