Ignorance/Jahiliyyah
An absorbing study of attitudes towards outsiders, spanning two continents and sixty years.
1949. Small town Colorado. A group of regular American students struggle to accept a foreigner in their midst; their unthinking behaviour will have terrible consequences that are to change world history. In London, sixty years later, a university professor’s work analysing those consequences takes on a frightening personal dimension when Layla Ahmad walks into his office...
Steve Waters' play Ignorance/Jahiliyyah was first performed at Hampstead Theatre, London, in 2012.
Steve Waters ran the MPhil in Playwriting at Birmingham University for several years; he now teaches Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He is also an acclaimed playwright whose plays have been staged at the Donmar Warehouse, the Sheffield Crucible, Hampstead Theatre and the Bush Theatre.