Little Miss Burden by Matilda Ibini

Original version

BBC Radio 4 FM

BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

BBC Radio 4

Radio 4

Radio 4 (FM)

Drama

BBC Radio 4 LW

Drama: Little Miss Burden

Little Miss Burden

Drama on 4

BBC Radio 4 - Drama on 4, Little Miss Burden

1990s pop culture and her sisters help Little Miss live with physical impairment.

Little Miss grows up with physical impairment, and a love of 1990s pop culture and her sisters. Sometimes tricky, often funny, always energetic new drama by Matilda Feyisayo Ibini.

Matilda Feyisayo Ibini draws on her own journey of sharing life with LGMD, in a whirlwind of 90s pop, video games and the joy of having sisters. Little Miss Burden is her most recent award winning stage drama, reimagined for her Radio 4 debut.

Big Sis, Little Sis and Little Miss are inseparable, the coolest, fiercest, most super talented-est girl band ever assembled.  At 13, Little Miss is given a gift which cannot be returned. It’s a part of her. She has to share her body and life with it. And she needs to find a way for the two of them to get along as they can’t both be Player One.

This coming-of-age tale smashes together 90s nostalgia, Nigerian family, East London and Sailor Moon to tell the sometimes tricky, often funny truth about growing up with a physical impairment.

Matilda Feyisayo Ibini is an award-winning bionic, queer playwright, screenwriter and (occasional) facilitator from London (a Nigerian Londoner if you will).  She has Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophy and is a wheelchair user. Her work often centres women, disabled people, queer people and the Black British experience through a magical realist lens. 

Her debut play, Muscovado for  BurntOut Theatre, premiered in October 2014. Muscovado subsequently co-won the Alfred Fagon Audience Award 2015. The Grape that Rolled Under the Fridge was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2019.  Little Miss Burden premiered at the Bunker Theatre in 2019, was a finalist for an OffWestEnd Award for Best New Play and won a Popcorn Finalist Award.

Co-producer Debbie Hannan's forthcoming stage productions include The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester.

Cast:
Little Miss…………………………… Saida Ahmed
Lil Sis………………………………….Ani Nelson
Big Sis…………………………………Ewa Dina 
Mum………………….……………….Diana Yekinni
		
Co-Directors ………………………..Polly Thomas and Debbie Hannan
Illustration……………………………Geroff My Visuals
Sound Recordist……………………John Merriman, Crown Lane Studios
Sound Designer……………………..Alisdair McGregor

Thanks to dramaturg Jules Howarth.

Executive Producer………………….Eloise Whitmore	

A Naked production for BBC Radio 4

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

Drama

Little Miss Burden

Genres

Brand

BBC Radio 4 FM

About BBC Radio 4