2023 Longlist
Congratulations to all writers on our 2023 Longlist.
Abi Zakarian
WORTHY WOMEN
An epic adventure concerning the freeing of the eight Worthy Women warriors of the infamous Amberley Panels: a very serious comedy about the restoration (actually, the rewriting) of all those histories into all these herstories.
Alison Carr
Birdie
Inspired by true life cases, this dark drama sees a family fractured by an unforgivable crime reunited. And no one emerges unscathed.
Amy Ng
Girl Disappeared
A girl disappears during the 2019 Hong Kong protests. Her corpse is found naked in the ocean. Did she commit suicide, as the police claimed? Or was she murdered for her political activism?
Ana Peralta
Sunrise at Katavi Park
A young woman attends therapy to deal with her grief, following the loss of her best friend in the Grenfell fire.
Ariella Como Stoian
To be a bat
Moi’s brother Jo is dead. Their mum spends all her time curating a teenage room that will never be, while their dad creates an uncanny, virtual model of Jo designed to bring closure. Meanwhile, in the cemetery behind their house, Moi meets sometimes-wolf Luna, and together they hunt for the ghosts of those they’ve lost.
Ashley Milne
Tap Root
A boy is released from the secure unit he grew up in and tries to grapple with his past whilst forging a future.
Ava Hickey
Cow and Pig
Pig snorts when she laughs and Cow is a cow for pointing it out. In art school they were inseparable. Now graduates, they must try and navigate a world of existential dread and the meaning of art.
Ayse Evans
Watching a Whale Fall
A crew of femme pirates must come to terms with their untimely deaths whilst they’re haunted by the ghosts of the men they’ve killed.
Caoimhe Farren
Hello Charlie
Mave has hidden behind her drunken alter-ego, Charlie, for years. Can she finally say goodbye to her beloved and make amends, or will Charlie take over completely?
Carley Magee
Stuff & Things & Junk & Belonging
Four estranged siblings reluctantly reunite for their taxidermist father’s wake. When their childhood home then warps into an inescapable loop of time and space they are confronted with their greatest fear: having to make conversation with each other.
Daisy Hall
Bellringers
In a thunderstorm, two bellringers wait for lightning to strike.
Danielle Phillips
Children of the Night
Doncaster’s infamous club Karisma opens its doors for the final time, but what happens to the town and punters it leaves behind?
Child of the night, Lindsay Jenkins won’t let it go without a fight.
A love poem to Donny and a feisty middle finger to Thatcher.
Karisma. Are. You. Ready?
Eleanor Cartmill
Wonderkid
Manchester 2018. Shooting to infamy overnight, a wannabe-footballer and gonnabe-dancer grapple with exposure, selfhood and enduring ambition.
elle van lil
the thing about touch.
Through Mo’s carousel of intimate partners, we learn how her life is touched by every person she’s ever touched.
Emma Gibson
LUMIN
The pigs are stressed, Liv won’t eat, and Ma wants everyone to follow the Constitutions. Set in a modern-day cult on the outskirts of the Chihuahuan desert in Texas, this new play about our need for community, asks why the line between delusion and what the rest of us believe, is getting blurrier than ever.
Esme Mahoney
WISHBONE
When her best friend Sid dies on a date, Loz enters an anxiety spiral that prevents her from attending the funeral. This brings Sid raging back to her door, pursued by Hades, Beelzebub, and a weirdly hot, emotionally complicated, Archangel Gabriel.
Esohe Uwadiae
Pots and Pans and Prayers
This play follows a mother and her three daughters as they navigate the kidnapping of their husband/father during a routine trip to Nigeria, including the secrets that unravel in his absence.
Georgia Green
PRIVATE ADULT THINGS
When two teenagers plan to have sex in a graveyard at midnight on New Year’s Eve, the last thing they expect is to intersect with two women digging up a body.
Héloïse Thual
Dogs Don’t Do Wolves
Two teenagers realise their Grandma has been keeping them away from society and from their family story until the visit of a door to door saleswoman starts shaking their beliefs.
Jess Edwards
Spooky Action at a Distance
A love story about physics, for two performers of any gender, which begins like a Richard Curtis rom-com and ends as a terrible co-dependent nightmare. Just like life.
Jessica Siân
Thread
A woman working for an online fast fashion brand is bewitched by a dress made by a dispossessed girl at the other end of the supply chain.
Joanne Gallagher
The Bouncy
Moving back home, all ballroom in a box room, Kirsty tries to save her sister fae a man whose power is violence. The Bouncy is set in a deindustrialised Scottish town; a song of working-class women and wild joy – we get all of five minutes here, better make it fuckin count.
Judi Amato
An Unexceptional Mother
Bernadette is a good mother – a loving, present mother. A pillar of her church, she has always done her best for her daughter and everyone around her. But when fifteen-year-old Orla tells her she is pregnant, Bernadette finds what is best for her daughter might just go against everything she believes in.
Kaleya Baxe
the light that blinds
How can a black daughter resolve an argument with her white mother when history stands between them? An exploration of mixed race daughterhood.
Kayla Feldman
Watchdog
In the middle of the night, two sisters break into a synagogue to confront a woman who is watching over a dead body. A revenge thriller exploring forgiveness and redemption.
Kolbrún Björt Sigfúsdóttir
This Is a Gift
A riff on the Midas myth set in modern Scotland – a fable about providence, care and wealth.
Laila Latifa
Cally
Fighting to overcome adversity on the Cally, 23-year-old Miriam looks after her younger siblings as they confront the challenges of living in poverty with big goals, trying to escape the class they were born into through their family business venture.
Linda Marshall Griffiths
the invisible
El Irving disappeared seventeen years ago. When his sister Tor, sees him on screen at a protest, she embarks on a journey that will lead her to the invisible.
Louisa Hayford
AHEMMAA (QUEENS)
In 1957, on the eve of Ghana’s independence, Joy and Dafeen Donkor, the two warring wives of John Donkor, seek independence on their own terms.
Lydia Sabatini
You Are Now Approaching Brackham-Under-Sea. Please Dive Carefully.
Two estranged friends reunite in the face of a catastrophic flood in an Essex coastal town.
Martha Watson Allpress
Ask Her If She Still Keeps All Her Kings in the Back Row
Ella loves Travis, Travis loves Ella. Travis is ill, Ella is tired. Then Ella fucks Toby. Ask Her If She Still Keeps All Her Kings in the Back Row is a play about coping, or not coping. Yeah it’s a play about not coping at all.
Mary Higgins
very wet
When Nell was seven, her mum ran off with a much older woman. Years later, Nell travels to the waterlogged Scottish Highlands to confront her dead mum’s ex-lover.
Mojola Akinyemi
Great Mother – Iya Ayaba
During the Biafran War in 1960s Nigeria, a young nun encounters a photojournalist while going through her own inner turmoil.
Morna Young
The Stoor.
“I’ve ay cleaned up efter the rich. Noo I need you tae return the favour”.
Nancy Netherwood
Radiant Boy
North-East England, 1983. As a snowstorm rages outside, trainee singer Russell and his mother Maud await the arrival of a young priest who believes Russell is a victim of possession. A play with music about faith, shame and queerness and finding connection through art.
Natalie McGrath
The Peace
It’s 1998 and New Labour are in power. They’ve kicked off their heels and peace in Northern Ireland is a priority. Final negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement are coming to a close, and in the middle of it all is Mo.
Natasha Collie
Eleven at Night Somewhere Without You
Ren is missing. Has she been whisked off for a reality TV show, become a secret agent, been sucked into a video game or gone to a party in another universe? In the hopeful limbo of Not Knowing, couldn’t they all be true?
Rachel Mars
BLOOD PLAY
BLOOD PLAY is a big camp epic about the medieval Church’s creation of the blood libel myth in Norwich, smashed against the contemporary wellness/medical world that trades in similar territory. Money, power, and really shitty saints.
Roberta Livingston
Sweet Smoke
When Maya gets possessed by a karaoke machine, it turns her into a flesh-eating monster – and who is her first target? Her drama school bestie Zadie.
Rosie Pierce
Non-Negotiable
Who do we trust when we can’t trust ourselves? Non-Negotiable follows a couple facing the prospect of a terminal diagnosis who are forced to reckon with their mortality. In a race against time, the body, and deteriorating cognition, decisions have to be made about the “non-negotiable” facts, truths and events to cling on to while their world falls apart.
Sandy Foster
Jicama
When Beth loses her baby, grief arrives as a fully-formed symphony. Haunted by its looping presence, Beth is left with a choice. Let it destroy her or get it out.
Sarah Grochala
Intelligence
When a Victorian female computing pioneer tries to make a career for herself as a serious scientist, her path is blocked by men in every direction. When she gets the chance to try again, first in World War II America and 1980s Silicon Valley, she realises that there is more at stake than her own thirst for fame: it’s the very nature of intelligence that she should be fighting for.
Sarah Sigal
Spirits
Spirits is a one-woman show about Goldy, a Jewish-Latvian immigrant accounting for herself in front of an audience of strangers long after her death, in an attempt to make sense of her life. She tells the story of how, in Chicago in the 1920s, a struggling single mother got caught up in bootlegging, gangsters and the realm of the supernatural.
Sepy Baghaei
A Good Day Will Come
A Good Day Will Come is a new play inspired by the ongoing ‘Woman Life Freedom’ revolution in Iran. The play interrogates the responses of two women to the unfolding events – Ariane, a photographer in Iran, and Suri, a playwright in the diaspora – both of whom ask themselves: “What do I do?”
Shaan Sahota
The Angels Were Worms.
A court room drama set during the Roman Inquisition, 1599. The self-educated miller, Menocchio, won’t accept what the experts tell him to believe. He stands trial and is burned at the stake for his theory that the planets formed from curdling cheese.
Sonali Bhattacharyya
King Troll (The Fawn)
Two migrant sisters create a powerful avatar to help them navigate the violence of state racism, but it starts to echo the monster within themselves.
Sophie Jacome
Glass Houses
Years after the massacre of the Donnelly family at the hands of their community, Johnny O’Connor – the only witness – is still grappling with the reality of what he saw, and what it means to live in a world in which that could happen.
Stella Green
Nine Avalanches
As they compulsively recreate the moment just before an event took place, a person’s obsession with the past begins to distort the present. Doppelgängers, imagined tv show appearances, and the sound of applause from an audience they can’t locate, Nine Avalanches is an attack on time, fantasy and who’s watching.
Tiwa Lade
Small Talk.
Tiwa sits down with Oprah Winfrey to deep dive into her psychopathy.
Zoe Cooper
Cambium Layer
Susie and her adult daughter Skye bicker about everything: from Susie’s worsening MS and rather lax attitude to kitchen hygiene, to the increasing flood risk that threatens her home. When unemployed and troubled Simon invites himself in, Skye is suspicious – but perhaps this new friendship holds the key to coping with the rising tide.