According to Coash, the play was inspired by an event which took place when he and his wife were living in Egypt: “Islamic fundamentalists attacked unsuspecting, early morning tourists at the ancient Temple of Hatshepsut in the Valley of Queens. Sixty-two dead, fifty-seven of them foreigners. Many of the bodies were mutilated with religious tracts stuffed into at least one disembowelled female body.” Coash has worked for theatres such as Manhattan Theatre Club and Actors Theatre of Louisville. Coash has won several playwriting awards including Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Hammerstein Emerging Playwright Award, The Kennedy Center’s Lorraine Hansberry Award and a Jerome Playwriting Fellow at the Minneapolis Playwrights’ Centre.

Reviewing the South African premiere of the production at the National Arts Festival (NAF) earlier this year, Gayle Edmunds noted that the timing of the UJ Arts & Culture’s professional debut with this particular production seemed eerily clairvoyant, “as the people of Egypt once more took to the streets in political protest on either side of the “Morsi” divide.” Edmund goes on to describe the production as “an intimate profile of a pair of lovers – one Egyptian, one English. They are on the periphery of society not only because theirs is a mixed cultural match, but because they are homosexual in a homophobic place.”