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Introduction 
 
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Actors playing multiple roles
 
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Adaptation
 
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Idea for her book
 
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The Thomas Coram foundling hospital
 
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The cast
 
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The production team
 

 
 

Introduction

Helen Edmundson's adaptation of Jamila Gavin’s novel Coram Boy, produced in the Olivier Theatre in November 2005, was directed and co-designed by Melly Still and involved a production team of 29 people. It is an epic production with a cast of 20 actors playing multiple roles plus a chorus of 17 singers performing excerpts from Messiahby Handel, one of the Foundling Hospital’s first benefactors.

Jamila first had the idea for her book after a discussion with a friend revealed to her the existence in the mid-eighteenth century of “Coram men”, often corrupt individuals who exploited the emotional calamity experienced by unmarried mothers by promising (for money) to take their babies to the new orphanages that had sprung up in England following the establishment in London in 1741 of the very first of these: the Thomas Coram foundling hospital. Some babies made it there – many did not.

 

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Coram Boy
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