The Trial Of Kelly Connor

In 2007 a script-in-hand performance of the play The Trial Of Kelly Connor was staged at Finborough Theatre in London. The script was written by the acclaimed poet and playwright Peter Oswald, and the play directed by Tim Carroll. Read more on Peter Oswald's work at Wikipedia.
The play has yet to be fully produced, so if you are interested in getting involved to make this happen, or know someone who is, please get in touch using the contact page.

Oswald says of Kelly’s book, “I am more and more interested in focusing on contemporary reality in such a way as to find within it the same ancient poetic forms that have moved playwrights down the ages. I would be fascinated to explore the possibilities of a contemporary tragedy, which, though centred on a car crash, is able to attain something of the dimensions of the ancient Greek tragedies. If the crash was just a neutral accident, why is Kelly destroyed and transformed by it? If it was not an accident, if it was in some way a design of fate, what does that tell us about the nature of the universe?”

“There are questions we perhaps avoid, which cry out to us from the most commonplace events. Good drama has its feet on the ground and its head far above and beneath the ground, and Kelly Connor’s real life story contains all the necessary dimensions and elements, I believe, for an extremely ambitious but accessible piece of dramatic work.”

Peter Oswald’s credentials are substantial. His adaptation of Schiller’s Mary Stuart, completed a hugely successful four-month run at the Apollo Theatre. Over the past decade he has had two plays produced at the National, two world premieres at Shakespeare’s Globe and several translations staged, including Lorca’s Dona Rosita the Spinster at the Almeida.

From www.offwestend.com:

In 1971, seventeen year old Kelly Connor knocked down and killed an elderly pedestrian… In her painful quest to understand and take responsibility for having taken a life, Kelly Connor’s conscience leads her into unknown regions of the soul where a battle takes place between herself and hosts of angels and demons in an inner court case where she is both judge and defendant. This remarkable new play chronicles the true story of a modern woman’s unrelenting search for the truth.

The Trial of Kelly Connor combines the themes of mental health, life and death, spirituality and conscience in a true story that is at the same time universal and personal. Since Kelly Connor’s accident in 1971, there have been 53,000 pedestrian deaths in the UK.