Award

The Theatre Uncut Political Playwriting Award was created with the aim of finding the next generation of playwrights who want to explore the big issues that affect our lives today. 

Submissions for the Theatre Uncut Political Playwriting Award #2 closed at midnight 7th October 2020. Thank you to all of the brilliant playwrights that submitted your plays. We know how much time, work and energy goes into writing a play and we feel so fortunate that you are sharing your work with us. Our team are busy reading through them all and we will be in touch with news as soon as we can.

The winner of the inaugural award was two Palestinians go dogging by Sami Ibrahim, which we will be proudly co-producing with the Royal Court. The shortlisted plays were 100 Ways the Fire Starts by Max Wilkinson, Brennschluss by Naomi Westermann, Compression by JD Stewart, Moonlight on Leith by Laila Noble and Emilie Robson, Nameless Estate by Nana-Kofi Kufuor, Takeaway by Nathan Powell. We will also be co-producing the shortlisted play The Merythr Stigmatist by Lisa Parry with the Sherman Theatre Cardiff.

Criteria

• The Theatre Uncut Political Playwriting Award is open to writers based in the UK only

• The award winner receives £9,500

• There is no age restriction

• There is no minimum level of experience

• This award has been created to support playwrights who are writing new plays, so although we deeply appreciate the skills of both adaptation and translation we can only accept original pieces of work

• We welcome musicals or plays with music at their heart

• This award is for plays longer than 60 minutes in length, so at least 40 pages or 9,000 words

• The play must not have received professional public production of any kind (public readings not included)

• The play must be written for stage

• The play should need no more than 6 actors

• We can accept plays by multiple writers

• We are looking for new voices that haven’t yet had many opportunities to have their work produced by a professional company or venue. We are accepting plays from writers who have had no more than two original plays presented as professional full production runs (runs longer than 3 weeks) excluding pantomimes and adaptations

A Political Play

• We have discussed this a lot, we realised there were a lot of plays that were about politics that we didn’t think were really political plays. We are still exploring this brilliant question. We don’t think there is an ultimate definition, but what we have reached so far is ‘a play that explores the individual’s relationship with society’.

The Award

• The winner of the award will receive £9,500. By accepting the award the playwright will agree to exclusively option the play to Theatre Uncut, the Lyric Belfast, the Sherman Theatre, the Traverse Theatre, the Young Vic and the Traverse Theatre for a period of 18 months from the date of the award announcement

• There is no guarantee of production

• All partners have the right to opt in or opt out of any potential production

• The winning play will also have the opportunity to be published by Nick Hern Books 

• By submitting your play you are will be stating that you understand and accept all of these terms 

• A longlist of 20 plays will be read by Co-Artistic Directors of Theatre Uncut Emma Callander and Hannah Price

• A final shortlist of 6 plays will be read by Kwame Kwei-Armah (Young Vic), Gareth Nicholls (Traverse Theatre), Joe Murphy (Sherman Theatre), Rebecca Mairs (Lyric Belfast), Matt Applewhite (Nick Hern Books) and Jessica Stewart (Independent Talent)

• By the time the winning script has been identified it will have been read by at least 10 theatre professionals, from a wide range of backgrounds with a wide range of different perspectives on the world

• The writer must exclusively own and control all copyright and all other related rights to the submitted script. It must be available for production and unattached to any other organisation or individual

• All submissions will be acknowledged, but Theatre Uncut are only able to provide feedback to the writers of the final shortlist of 6 plays 

• All scripts will be read anonymously to provide equality throughout the reading process – we will ensure that all readers are not aware of the writer’s name

• The winner will be announced in Spring 2021 

• By accepting the award the playwright will agree to exclusively option the play to Theatre Uncut, the Young Vic, the Traverse Theatre and the Sherman Theatre for a period of 18 months from the date of the award announcement. There is no guarantee of production, but we will hope to co-produce the play with the theatre/venue/company that will best serve the play

Reading Process

• We are dedicated to making the award process as transparent as we possibly can, so we will be publishing the names and biogs of our entire reading panel here

• All plays will be read anonymously by a panel of readers selected for their skill and experience, from a wide range of cultural, financial, geographical, racial, class, gender, sexuality and age perspectives and those who identify as disabled

• All plays will be read by at least two readers

• Two readers will initially read the first 20 pages of your play. If they feel it excites them it will go on to be read in its entirety 

• From the plays that receive a full read 20 will be selected as a longlist to be read by Theatre Uncut Co-Artistic Directors Hannah Price and Emma Callander 

• Emma and Hannah will then identify a shortlist of 6 plays which will then be read by our final panel of judges from the Lyric Belfast, Sherman Theatre, Traverse Theatre, Young Vic, Independent Talent and Nick Hern Books who will then choose the reader at a judging meeting in January 2021

• We know how much work goes into the creation of a play, and how dangerous misjudged feedback can be, so we will only give feedback to the 6 shortlisted playwrights. This will be the reflections of each of the final panel of judges

• The winner will be announced in Spring 2021

RESOURCES

There is a wealth of digital content online to inspire playwrights right now. We thought we would share some of our favourite resources here. Let us know if there are any good ones we have missed…

Write a Play - workshops and articles from the Bruntwood Award

Traverse Theatre - workshops for Open Submissions

Bush Theatre - 10 Minute Masterclasses

Fouthwall - Playwrights in Lockdown with Dan Rebellato

Royal Court - Playwrights podcast

Old Vic and Sherman Theatre - Playcrush playwrights talking about their favourite plays

Papatango - blogs by playwrights during lockdown

We thank our fantastic partners and Independent Talent, Nick Hern Books and Arts Council England for supporting us. This has been an extremely difficult time for our industry. We at Theatre Uncut stand with all of our colleagues and are grateful to be able to continue our work nurturing the best new writing talent the UK has to offer.

The Theatre Uncut Political Playwriting Award #2 was made possible by the generous support of Independent Talent and the Arts Council England.