2025 Shortlist
We’re delighted to present our Shortlist for 2025.
If you are interested in learning more about or producing one of these plays, please contact us.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.