2025 Longlist

Congratulations to all writers on our 2025 Longlist.

If you are interested in learning more about or producing one of these plays, please contact us.

 

Afsaneh Gray
Exceptional

When British-Iranian Anahita suggests her sister Neshad’s son wasn’t cast as Joseph in the school nativity because of racism, it forces Neshad to confront her attitudes to Britishness, assimilation, and how to fight for the best future for her son. 

 

Alex Medland
We’re Gonna Kill Billy

We’re Gonna Kill Billy is a play about four teenage girls attempting to save the world. And also Billy, the thirteen year old they’ve kidnapped.

 

Amy Tobias
WHAT I THINK OF MY HUSBAND

An exploration of the life of Emma Gifford and her marriage to Thomas Hardy. Once his muse and first editor, she became the real-life mad woman in the attic.

 

Billie Esplen
Fucking Jane Austen

A time-travelling Jane Austen and her lesbian lover must convince a dying Austen scholar to help them reveal Jane’s sexuality to the world.

 

Britny Virginia
Up in the Mango Trees

A young disabled woman is the first to run for Saint Lucia’s prestigious title of Carnival Queen.

 

Chloe Palmer
If the Sea Should Part

Hastings is a ghost town, beloved Stacey’s arcade sits on top of a rotting pier and the council refuse to do anything about it. A reflection on grief, gentrification and belonging.

 

Christy Ku
Unbirth

Desperate to die, daughter goes back in time to prevent her own birth. Unfortunately, she accidentally takes her mother with her.

 

Cordelia Lynn
Witch Play

Over seven hundred years, three very different women are incited to revolt by their imaginary cats. The revolution comes with devastating personal consequences, but tiny positive ones for humanity. Maybe.

 

Danielle James
THREE BOYS

Three choir boys, learning what it means to love and be loved for the very first time, realise that they have all fallen in love with the same person – the priest that is abusing them.

 

Eireann Devlin
Hefted

Set on an isolated, Cumbrian sheep farm during the height of the 2001 Foot and Mouth epidemic, ‘Hefted’ explores how trauma has affected Bab’s relationship to her home and her father and questions if you can ever truly return home once you have left.

 

Ellen Bannerman
Weeping Woman

A feminist body horror set in the art world. Weeping Woman is an interrogation of confessional art and the art world’s commodification of female suffering.

 

Emily White
The Children of Glyndwr

It is February 1980 and Michael, and his mum have just moved to Wales to escape his violent father. But they arrive just as a Welsh nationalist group, violently opposed to the loss of Welsh culture and language, have started setting fire to English owned holiday homes, and tensions are running high.

 

Evie Chandler
Ordinary Time

A vow of silence, a shaking faith, a chance encounter at the boundary of a monastery drives John and Matthew together. In the toil of life in the medieval Yorkshire Dales, they must choose between love and covenant.

 

Georgina Duncan
Sapling

Belfast, 1990. 16 year old Gerry Flynn strives for normality during the last gasps of The Troubles but the events of one day shatter everything. His brother’s memorial garden is destroyed, his killer released from prison, and the arrival of an enigmatic stranger, Ryan, forces Gerry to confront the haunting dilemma: is Ryan the solution to his problems or the reason they exist in the first place?

 

Hannah Mirsky
To The Earth You Shall Return

Iona Bloom is on a divine mission to bring back an ancient pagan celebration in her town. But the field she needs to use is full of grazing sheep – and the farmer refuses to move them. Then his lambs start dying.

 

Hannah Salt
CROSSINGS

Brie, anxious and about to embark on her IVF journey, meets Patsy, a gregarious older Irish man on regular ferry crossings and the pair strike up an unlikely friendship. Brie’s caught between life in the UK, post-Brexit, and starting anew in Ireland. As they each discover the depths they’ll go to, to forge family, they are watched and perhaps guided by an ancient, wandering Saint Brigid herself. 

 

Jane McCarthy
A Straw House

A mother and daughter check into a bedsit, fleeing an unnamed threat. Slowly the mother begins to believe the threat has followed them there, while her daughter is beginning to doubt the threat exists at all. A Straw House is a tense three-hander blending horror, surrealism and magical realism.

 

Jane Upton
Belongings

October 2022. In the dead of night, 400 men seeking asylum in the UK are placed in two hotels in a town in the East Midlands. By the morning, a community is turned upside-down.

 

Jane Wainwright
Wide Open Spaces

Samuel and May agree to meet at their baby’s grave on the first anniversary of her death, but one of them can’t travel… A play about grief, mental health and what it means to be alive.

 

Kate Attwell
Wold Meteor

A small town is slowly destroyed by a master disaster capitalist after a meteor lands in the town.

 

Kayleigh Mai Hinsley
First Gravedigger

A young greengrocer is appointed as nuclear deputy in a seemingly rogue move by the Prime Minister. On the brink of nuclear war, an almost unthinkable power has been thrust into her hands and she must make an impossible decision.

 

Laurie Ogden
Yes Chef

Danni is a young northern chef dreaming of rising through the ranks, when Lola, an experimental chef with big ideas, joins the kitchen. She forces Danni to dream of a different world, but something dark is brewing behind the closed kitchen doors.

 

Manjinder Virk
THE ROOM 

‘The Room’ is set in a fictional writers room on a successful TV show. The room starts to unravel for Charanjeet, the only writer of colour after an unexpected incident.

 

Mareth Burns
An Effigy Burning in the Arctic

A young man from Dundee joins a whaling ship heading for the Arctic. Meanwhile, back in Dundee, jute mill workers struggle against unjust conditions.

 

Mei Leng Yew
Down Side Up

A teenage girl faces a moral crisis when her efforts to propel her disabled sister to internet stardom has unexpected consequences.

 

Mwansa Phiri
A Bit Salty

Aspiring Tory politician Chali Ngosa’s election campaign takes a turn when relentless online trolling—spearheaded by his very own sister—exposes scandalous secrets, shaking the entire Ngosa household. A Bit Salty is a family political drama about loyalty, resentment, and identity, all unfolding around the Ngosa Sunday dinner table.

 

Naomi Sumner Chan
HIDE AND SEEK WITH JIMMY LING

30 years ago Jimmy slept with his boss’s wife, got her pregnant, then ran away to the other side of the world abandoning his lover & their child but now his past has come back to haunt him. This play shows the realities and complexities associated with transracial adoption and reunion from a birth father’s POV.

 

Natalia Lewis
Northern Folk

When Theo returns to the north, he confronts the haunting world he tried to escape. Plagued by folkloric demons, ominous sheep, & half the local pub, the north will change Theo in ways he could never have imagined. Rooted in the north, Northern Folk is a dark comedy about Northern Folk.

 

Nurit Chinn
I LOVE STRANGERS

In simultaneous stories, six Jews reckon with their contradictory impulses to be together and to be apart. A play about assimilation, exclusion, and nationalism, I LOVE STRANGERS is a meditation on what it means to belong. 

 

Olga Braga
while we burn

Set during the Ukraine war, While We Burn follows a teenage prisoner returning home, a Moldovan outsider, and two Russian soldiers stationed near a small town, as lives quietly fracture under the weight of suspicion, grief and shifting loyalties. The play explores how ordinary people are reshaped by ideology, fear, and the slow erosion of what holds a society together.

 

Phoebe Eclair-Powell
THE (YELLOW) WALLPAPER

Alison is writing an adaptation of The Yellow Wallpaper or is it writing her? A horror show about the horror show of motherhood.

 

Rachel McKay
Am I Next?

It’s Johannesburg, South Africa, 2019 and four teenage girls assemble to fight what even their leaders refuse to; gender-based violence. Their weapons are the school newspaper and pure feminine rage, however there’s nothing like a new transfer student from England to complicate things.

 

Rachel Tookey
Slime

Thirty-year-old former child star Amber is making a living on OnlyFans dressed as the teenage character that made her famous – when she is approached by Cameron, the ‘cancelled’ director of the same TV show. Cameron proposes they relaunch the show together in an attempt to revive both their careers, setting them on a path to confront the meaning of redemption, forgiveness and the long shadow of trauma.

 

Sadie Pearson
VENUS: The Body

A classical art critic on the brink of retirement. A talented young radical looking for her big break. There has never been a first-rank woman artist – what will it take?

 

Sarah Ann McCay
Car Crash

An arguing middle-aged couple die suddenly in a road traffic accident. As they are processed by a tired and somewhat cynical St Peter at the Pearly Gates Toll Booth they come to realise how much life and love still exists between them. They face their life’s demons: infertility, infidelity, terminal illness, alcoholism, reaching resolution and prepare to enter eternity, together forever.

 

Sarah Jane Gordon
A Patent Lie

This is the story of the rise and fall of Martin Shkreli; the guy who in 2015 would come to embody the ruthlessness of the drugs-as-financial-assests business model.

 

Sasha Frost
Froggy

Following the brutal murder of her cousin Kingsley, Ava is forced to return to Bristol, the hometown she had been relieved to escape, in order to unravel the mystery surrounding his death. To do so she must rebuild her relationship with her secretive, estranged father Froggy, a legendary local underground sound system man, and come to understand the social and historical forces that have shaped – at times disfigured – both their lives, and that led to Kingsley’s death.

 

Silva Semerciyan
Przewalski’s Horses

A young woman flees Kyiv for her ancestral home in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, intending to stay for good, but her grandmother, a resettler, has no intention of letting her in the door.

 

Sonali Bhattacharyya
The Fingerprint Bureau

Bengali mathematicians, Azizul Haque and Chandra Bose, are given the impossible responsibility of developing British methods of surveillance and categorisation of their fellow Bengalis, in Kolkata’s Anthropometric Bureau under the Raj.

 

Stef Smith
A Search for the End

A play which explores how geographical borders affect women’s bodies, along with a formal experiment in ‘linguistic choreography’.

 

Tia-Renee Mullings
A to B

Two young creatives get ready for a blind date, but getting there becomes the real test.  Between teefing little sisters, gentrified patties, flying bird poo, missing barbers, and a trim that could end a man, romance might not be the only thing on the line.