The Stage: Renu Arora to pen show about near-death experience thanks to Peggy Ramsay award
Leading theatre publication The Stage has reported on Renu Arora’s Peggy Ramsay Award and the continuing development of The Burgundy Book, introducing the work as a digitally immersive musical based on the accident and near-death experience that altered the course of Renu’s life in 2017 and marking an important moment for a project that has evolved across several artistic forms, from personal experience into writing, from writing into music and song, and now towards a full theatrical work.
For Renu, being featured in The Stage carried a particular meaning: as a seventeen-year-old South Asian girl in Wales, she read the publication while dreaming of a career in an industry to which she had no obvious route, and more than two decades later, it carried her name, photograph and original work.
The coverage also recognised the scale of Renu’s creative ambition, since The Burgundy Book does not simply recount an accident but asks what happens when a life is divided into a before and an after, and what it means to return to a future you have not yet seen; through original music, spoken word and immersive technology, the work invites an audience into questions of trauma, survival, consciousness, love and transformation.
The Peggy Ramsay Award will support Renu as she develops the piece from its current album form into a libretto and musical for the stage, following her 2025-26 residency at artsdepot and strengthening the growing momentum around the project.