Wonderful Wednesdays: Hannah Maxwell - Nan, Me and Barbara Pravi

An autobiographical epic on care, crisis and Eurovision.

“I wish I could say here our story starts. But this story starts later, and ended earlier. Is entirely fictional, and completely true. Voila.”

In 2021, Hannah Maxwell moved back to the Home Counties to care for her terminally ill grandfather. But this show isn’t about that. It’s about France’s Eurovision star Barbara Pravi, who’s just lovely.

In between cooking, cleaning and Countdown, Maxwell escapes into an intensifying fantasy of ballroom dances, heartfelt ballads, Parisian cafés, fluent French and definitely-not-creepy plots to engineer a meetcute with a random foreign celebrity. It’s La La Land meets Mission Impossible meets Hannah’s nan.

Combining spoken-word, video and chanson francaise, NAN, ME & BARBARA PRAVI sits you down at the kitchen table to talk through grief and care, addiction and recovery, and hope and coping in unprecedented times. A work-in-progress piece of storytelling theatre from the acclaimed creator of I, AMDRAM. 

Commissioned by Camden People’s Theatre and supported by Menagerie Theatre Company, Queen Mary University of London, and Colchester Arts Centre. Made possible by generous support from Arts Council England.