The Fingerprint Bureau

The new play from the team behind the sold-out, critically acclaimed dystopian thriller King Troll (The Fawn). Award-winning writer Sonali Bhattacharyya (Chasing Hares - Sonia Friedman Production Award and Theatre Uncut Political Playwriting Award and King Troll (The Fawn) - finalist for the Women's Prize for Playwriting) joins forces with two time Olivier Award nominee director Milli Bhatia (Seven methods of killing kylie jenner and Blue Mist, Royal Court Theatre) for this gripping new thriller about resistance, colonialism and technology that left its mark.  

Who gets to decide what makes you who you are?  

Calcutta, in British-occupied India. Two brilliant Bengali mathematicians, Azizul Haque and Chandra Bose, are given an impossible task: to develop new methods of identifying and categorising people through their fingerprints.  

What begins as a scientific breakthrough becomes something much bigger. As their work is taken up as a tool of British repression and surveillance, the two men find themselves caught between scientific discovery, colonial power and resistance.  

In this thrilling new production, Bhattacharyya explores the forgotten history behind one of modern policing’s most powerful technologies. What does it mean to create something that can be used to control your own people? And who gets remembered when history is written by those in power?  

The Fingerprint Bureau is commissioned and co-produced by Kali Theatre, renowned for presenting groundbreaking new theatre by female and non-binary writers of South Asian descent.  

A Stratford East and Kali Theatre Production