In a busy week of theatre openings For Canberra next week, it would have been easy to have missed the announcement that the Melbourne Theatre Company’s production play English, will open at The Playhouse on September 5.

But there is a very good local reason to rejoice in this production of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize winning play – it is directed by one of Canberra’s own, Tasnim Hossain.

Raised in Canberra in a well-known Bangladeshi-Australian family, she studied drama at Telopea Park School  and Narrabundah College and was for years an active participant in our local arts community as a fine performer of her own poetry, a writer with Canberra Youth Theatre and a participant in workshops for The Street Theatre’s Hive play development project.

Hossain has since quietly but assertively hit her straps in Australia’s mainstream theatre scene.

An alumna of the Australia Council for the Arts Future Leaders Program, she has been an artistic associate at NIDA and the Sydney Theatre company is a tutor in theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts.

She has toured Australia performing her own solo works and written short plays for Playwriting Australia’s Dear Australia project, ABC Radio National Fictions, Canberra Youth Theatre, Shopfront, and Australian Theatre for Young People, on whose board she has served.

In 2022 Hossain won the Sydney Theatre Award for Best Direction of an Independent Production for Yellow Face and was shortlisted for the 2022 Griffin Award for her script, Bombay Takeaway.

In 2023, she directed the Australian premiere of I Wanna Be Yours for Melbourne Theatre Company’s Education program. She was also assistant director on the Australian musical, Bloom, and on Bernhardt/Hamlet.

Now she’s directing English, billed as a story of “falling in love with your own voice,” which deals with an important subject for us all, peoples’ relationship to a new language.

Briefly, the play, by American-born Sanaz Toossi, is set in a small Iranian classroom where Marjan is teaching English to a motley crew of adult learners. Whatever their motives for taking on this strange new language, they find tensions flaring, connections forming and unspoken truths coming out as the final exams loom.

English has been praised as a comedy in which the laughs fly thick and fast and, like Eugene Ionesco before her, Toossi has seized upon the absurd conversations you’ll only hear in language lessons.

The ensemble cast includes Osamah Sami, best known for his book Good Muslim Boy, his film Ali’s Wedding, and the TV series House of Gods.

English, The Playhouse, September 5–7.