THE LITTLE ZOMBIE GIRL
Composer - Omar Shahryar
Librettist - Ed Harris
Roll up, roll up! The circus is coming!
And, ladies and gentlemen, steel yourselves for the most grotesque, most nightmarish, most horriblest freak the dead-end town of Grimpton has ever set its eyes upon:
The Little Zombie Girl!
Wait... what do you mean she’s escaped?!
A comic, heart-warming, Gothic opera about an undead girl blessed with a magical singing voice.
Ever since she was raised from the dead, the circus has exploited her and her magical singing to pull in the crowds. But now that The Little Zombie Girl’s escaped, is she free of the circus and its cruel exploitation – or does her magic voice simply bring out the greed in everyone?
The Little Zombie Girl is a comedy about trust, self-acceptance and belonging... and, obviously, an escaped zombie!
Creative Team
Music Director – Alastair Chilvers
Stage Director & Choreographer - Maggie Rawlinson
Set Designer - Neil Irish
Costume Designer - Anett Black
Assistant Music Director - Michael Rose
Assistant Director - William Byram
Production Management - eStage
The Shaw Theatre
100-110 Euston Road, London
13th & 14th Dec 2025
Meet our award winning composing team
OMAR SHAHRYAR
Composer
Omar Shahryar is an award-winning composer, music facilitator and specialist in the creation of new classical music for young audiences. Recent commissions include the symphonic fables Cours, cours, cours ! and Six Fables for the Orchestra National d’Auvergne, the children’s opera The Great Stink for English Touring Opera, the community opera Displaced: A Woolwich Arsenal Opera for Co-align in association with the English National Opera, and the site-specifi c song cycle Songs to Remember for Birmingham Opera Company.
Omar composed the digital mini-opera Blue, Red, Yellow... for English National Opera’s “Finish This” programme, which has been used to inspired over 14,000 primary school children around the UK to compose their own mini-operas. His internationally acclaimed opera about young people’s reactions to violent extremism, A Shoe Full of Stars, won the international YAM Award Prize for Best Opera for Young People 2018.
Omar leads participatory music projects for some of the world’s most prestigious classical music institutions, including the Royal Opera House, the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Glyndebourne, the Barbican Centre, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Streetwise Opera. He has led artist training for the Franz-Liszt University of Music in Budapest, the Royal Opera House of Norway, the Royal Opera House of Oman and the Teatro Colón in Colombia. Omar was lead researcher on the EU SMART Composer project, an Erasmus+ project for the European Commission investigating how best to train music professors at universities and conservatoires in entrepreneurship and digital marketing skills education.
Omar is a current board member for Tête-à-tête Opera Company and was on the steering committee of the European Network of Opera, Music and Dance Education (RESEO) between 2016 and 2020. In 2020, Omar fi nished his PhD thesis in the Composition of Opera for Young People at the University of York, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
ED HARRIS
Librettist
Ed Harris is a multi-award-winning, dyslexic writer based in Brighton. Before fi nding his feet as a writer, he was a binman, a care-worker and a carnie on Brighton Pier.
His fi rst major play was Mongrel Island, which opened in Soho Theatre in 2011 to great critical acclaim, before being picked up in Mexico where it toured for six months. Harris’s fi rst play for younger audiences, What the Thunder Said won a Writers Guild Award in 2017; and his fi rst opera with Omar Shahryar, A Shoe Full of Stars won an International YAM Award for best opera for young audiences in 2018.
His otherplays include The Cow Play, which had an Edinburgh Festival run and a tour of the South East, Never Ever After which was shortlisted for the Meyer-Whitworth Award, and Strangers Like Me which was on at the Dorfman, at The Royal National Theatre in 2023. Ed’s one of BBC Radio Drama’s most regularly commissioned dramatists, with his sitcom Dot running from 2015-21. Between 2011 and 2015 he won a Sony / Radio Academy Gold Award for the radio series The Resistance of Mrs Brown, a second Writers Guild Award for his play Troll, and a BBC Audio Drama Award for Billions. Last year, he was Lead Writer on Radio 4’s Kafka Season, for which he won the international Prix Europa Award for his biopic Franz and Felice, and was made Writer in Residence at Oxford University’s Kafka’s Transformative Communities Festival.
Ed is a Royal Literary Fellow. He is currently writing his first novel, Everything Burning Bright. He’s thrilled to be working with Omar Shahryar and London Youth Opera on The Little Zombie Girl this year. Ed Harris is represented by Matt Connell at Berlin Associates. He can sometimes be found at @edkharris on Instagram.