What if the only way into the life you want is to steal it? This poignant one-woman dark comedy from writer Maryam Garad is winner of the Tony Craze Award 2023 and the Pleasance’s Charlie Hartill Global Majority Fund 2026. REPARATIONS explodes onto the stage, exploring rehabilitation, wealth disparity and how jealousy festers in the absence of love. The play blends biting humour with psychological tension to show a girl who refuses to ask permission, desperate to be seen.
Pleasance Courtyard (Above) from Wednesday 5th – Sunday 30th August (not 17th, 24th) at 14:00.
https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/reparations
How did your own experiences of place and class inequality during lockdown inform the creation of Aisha and her world in REPARATIONS?
Lockdown was the first time I really started thinking about the premise. With everything paused, I wasn’t as busy with work or studies, so I went on walks just to get out of the house. On one walk through my local park, I noticed the wealth gap in my area in a really stark way, luxury flats on one side and council housing on the other. Seeing how gentrified it had become, I felt a brief moment of jealousy towards the people in the luxury homes, but I also noticed how quickly I was able to let it go. That stayed with me. I kept thinking about what it would mean if that feeling didn’t pass, especially if someone was already being let down by systems around them and didn’t have much stability or support at home. That question is where Aisha came from.
What interested you in exploring theft not just as a criminal act, but as a form of identity-making and survival?
What interested me was how theft can be more than a criminal act and instead become a way of trying to build a self when there are limited options available. With Aisha, I wanted to ground this in her history as a shoplifter, where the behaviour starts young and develops into kleptomania, shaped by compulsion but also a need for control in a reality that feels unstable.
After prison, she is trying to rebuild but is still marked by her past and shut out from stability. In that situation, stealing becomes about access, control, and belonging, not just objects. I was interested in how repetition shapes identity, where relief turns into habit and then into self-definition. As Aisha becomes drawn to V, admiration shifts into obsession, raising questions about exclusion, desire, and how far someone will go to feel whole again.
How do you balance Aisha’s charm and humour with the darker psychological and moral tensions at the centre of her journey?
I wanted to create a complex character, someone the audience could still find likeable and root for even as they are aware of what she is doing. Her charm and humour are not separate from the darker parts of her journey, they are part of how she survives and how she is able to move through the world, especially given her history as a shoplifter where the behaviour begins young and develops into kleptomania, shaped by compulsion and a need for control in an unstable reality. In that sense, they are essential to her, not a layer added on top.
Even in moments where her behaviour becomes more troubling, that wit and warmth still come through. Because it is a one-person show, everything is filtered through her perspective, so she is naturally an unreliable narrator. I wanted to lean into that rather than smooth it out. Her voice can be persuasive, funny and self-justifying, which draws the audience in, but also means we are never fully inside an objective truth. The balance comes from holding those contradictions at the same time
In what ways does the one-woman form shape the audience’s complicity in Aisha’s actions and choices?
The one-woman form shapes the audience’s complicity by placing them entirely inside Aisha’s perspective, with no external voices to challenge or correct her. From the opening scene, her unreliability is clearly established and the framing question, how does ‘a girl from ends’ end up here, it signals that the audience already knows there is a defined outcome, even if they do not yet know the path to it. That creates curiosity around process rather than result.
Because she is the only presence on stage, the audience becomes her listener, confidant, and at times her only witness. This intimacy draws them into her humour, charm, and reasoning, even when her actions are questionable. We are positioned close enough to understand her logic as it unfolds, which naturally produces complicity. The tension lies in wanting to reach the known endpoint while also questioning how each choice leads her there. Understanding her does not mean agreement, but the form makes it difficult to stay distant.
How does the shifting movement between council estates, luxury spaces and prison cells reflect the fluidity of identity and aspiration in the play?
Aisha’s movement between council estates, luxury penthouses, and prison cells reflects how fluid her identity and aspirations are throughout the play. These spaces are not just settings, but different worlds she moves between, each shaping how she sees herself and how she is seen. On the estate, her identity is shaped by familiarity, judgement, and survival. The luxury spaces represent desire and ambition, but also exclusion, where she is only ever an outsider until she begins to imagine a way in. By moving between these environments, the play shows how easily identity shifts depending on access and status. Aisha is never fixed in one version of herself. Instead, she adapts and reconstructs who she is based on the world she is trying to enter or escape, emphasising the instability at the heart of her ambition.
What do you hope audiences leave questioning about class mobility, envy and the idea of “becoming someone else?
I hope audiences leave questioning how real class mobility actually is, and whether it is something people can genuinely achieve or something they are constantly sold as possible. Aisha’s journey sits inside that tension, where aspiration is encouraged, but access is still shaped by circumstance, background, and perception. I also want them to recognise envy and the desire to become someone else as natural human feelings, rather than something that only belongs to certain people. The play is not about judging those emotions, but about understanding what they become when people are marginalised or made to feel like outsiders. I hope it encourages more empathy towards those experiences.