Chol Theatre Residency continued...

The play's author, Adam Strickland talked about the inspiration for the piece:

'I grew up in a small village on the edge of the Cotswolds... the experience of living in an English village is an integral part of The Ghost lesson, which grew out of an installation piece called The Little Room of the Big Questions, co-created with Shanaz Gulzar on 2000-2001. Earlier I had used school desks, digital imaging and performance to compare the lives of schoolchildren in England and Bangladesh.

The main source for the play is a classic work called The Dead Class by the late Polish theatrical legend Tadeuz Kantor. Seeing this play at the Edinburgh Festival in the late 1970's was a deep experience for me. Astonishingly, all the characters are dead. Kantor had the idea for the play while at the seaside as he looked through a cracked window into a derelict schoolroom. In the play he looked at Polish history through his own life. Likewise, in the character of Sam, I have used my experience as a child in the 60's as one layer of The Ghost Lesson; a starting point to explore issues of culture and identity, racism and intolerance.

In December 2002 I visited Poland...whilst there I went to Auschwitz-Birkenau. This had a huge impact on me. Although fictional, the story of Franziska, the Romany girl who feature in The Ghost lesson, is influenced by the fate of the Roma in the Second World War.'