Various Bruntwood at 20

Five Plays from the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78850-921-3
Verlag: Nick Hern Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 512 Seiten

Reihe: NHB Modern Plays

The Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting is the largest playwriting competition in Europe. Since its inception twenty years ago, it has received over 17,325 submissions, and awarded prizes to thirty-eight different plays across its various categories. This anthology brings together five of those extraordinary winning plays in a wide-ranging selection reflecting the history and scope of the prize - and the inestimable impact it has had over the past two decades. Pretend You Have Big Buildings by Ben Musgrave (Bruntwood Prize, 2005) is a tender and funny play about identity, loss, and growing up in Romford in the shadow of Canary Wharf. Winterlong by Andrew Sheridan (joint winner, 2008) is a shattering, heartbreaking play about searching for hope in a damaged world. Three Birds by Janice Okoh (Bruntwood Prize, 2011) is a darkly comic drama about three young siblings who find themselves home alone, without adult care. Wish List by Katherine Soper (Bruntwood Prize, 2015) is a powerful exploration of what our labour is worth and how life can be lived when the system is stacked against you. untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play by Kimber Lee (International Award, 2019) is a wickedly funny satire that wrestles with history and explodes cultural stereotypes. Also included is an incisive essay by theatre historian Rachel Clements on the impact of the Bruntwood Prize on the theatre landscape, as well as introductions by Sarah Frankcom and each of the selected authors.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Various

Leseproben

Head, Heart and Guts:
Twenty Years of the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting

It’s January 2016, and Erin Doherty is standing on the Royal Exchange Theatre’s Studio Stage, singing Meat Loaf’s ‘I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)’. Her character, Tamsin, has been cajoled into song by Luke (played by Shaquille Ali-Yebuah). Unaccompanied, self-conscious, Tamsin’s voice shakes and falters. Gradually, she finds her feet and, all of a sudden, the backing track kicks in. The world tilts. For a moment, Tamsin is supported by the full daft grandeur of a power ballad, and by the laughter and tears of the audience. And she soars: air guitar high kicks shed the tension of financial precarity and the constant worry that have smothered her throughout Katherine Soper’s . She is glorious. The song ends, and we’re back in Tamsin’s flat. It is awkward, silly and sad; it is hopeful, resilient and desperate; a one-two emotional and political gut-punch. It’s a kind of moment – urgent, original and deeply theatrical – which happens in many Bruntwood Prize-winning plays.

Writing in on 24 October 2024, theatre critic Anya Ryan argued that the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting has become ‘an integral part of the theatre landscape, propelling the careers of some of our most exciting writers’, in a piece whose headline declared that the prize is ‘vital to the UK’s new-writing ecology’. This collection brings together a selection of five of the thirty-eight winning plays to date, including . The texts gathered here are not presented as ‘best of the bests’, but offered as a curated group which aim to give readers a sense of the prize’s aims, development, values and impact over the past two decades.

The Bruntwood Prize has mattered to the theatre scene of the UK and beyond because, since its inception, it has been about much more than handing awards to a few exceptional plays. It has centred and celebrated the craft and creativity of the playwright, but in a way that understands the complex, interconnected network of the art and the ecology of the theatre. The plays published here are not the versions submitted to the prize but the texts as developed for production. Bruntwood Prizes, then, are the tip of a bigger iceberg: the most visible part, perhaps, but only part of the dramaturgical and developmental facilitation, and the support across the wider theatre ecology that Bruntwood and the Royal Exchange have offered to writers over the past two decades. Each of the plays in this volume is interesting and distinctive in its own right; each is committed to its own unique theatrical gesture. As dramaturg Suzanne Bell, whose involvement with the prize has been extensive, says, like many of the winning plays, they contain ‘a marriage of head, heart and guts’. Together, they speak to the theatrical boldness, the social conscience, and the connection to their moment which has characterised Bruntwood Prize plays since 2005.

Large-scale ambitions:
by Ben Musgrave

Ben Musgrave’s won the inaugural Bruntwood Prize in 2005. Musgrave had not had a professional production staged before winning the prize, although he had completed an MA Writing for Performance at Goldsmiths College, University of London; he has gone on to a successful scriptwriting career across multiple dramatic forms, and also one that – via his longstanding work teaching at the University of East Anglia – has supported many other writers. is distinctive for the way it combines a precise time and place (November–December 1995, Romford) with a story which has global as well as local implications, and for its negotiation of intertwined themes around grief, racism, family history, class and adolescence. In the central relationship between Danny (played in the 2007 Royal Exchange Theatre production by Sacha Dhawan) and Leon (played by Jonathan Bailey), Musgrave dramatises the fallout of disintegrating marriages, and the impact of environment on teenagers’ understandings of, and ability to inhabit, their own identities.

The play inherits and pushes at the strong social-realist tradition in British playwriting, as do by Duncan Macmillan and by Phil Porter which also received prizes in the inaugural year. There is a strong social conscience in Musgrave’s play which can also be seen in the rest of this collection, as well as many other Bruntwood plays, particularly those which are concerned with the challenges facing young people – especially those who have been pushed to the margins (Vivienne Franzmann’s , which won a prize in 2008, and Anna Jordan’s , which won in 2013, are also good examples of these). Writing in the , Dominic Cavendish described Musgrave’s play as ‘touching, funny, immensely assured’, while Dominic Maxwell, writing for , praised it for having ‘a scope and sense of recent history that too many new plays lack’.

Although much has developed and shifted in the prize since 2005, some fundamental principles have been established from the beginning. The anonymised, multi-stage reading process is one: plays are cut loose from any assumptions that a writer’s name or biography might carry. Equally significant is the commitment not just to awarding money – important, even career-altering, as that has been – but to supporting plays through development and aspiring (though not guaranteeing) to take them into production. At twenty-six years old, Musgrave was the youngest writer to have had a play on in the 750-seater, in-the-round, main space of the Royal Exchange. , and the Bruntwood Prize, opened doors at the Royal Exchange for early career writers. Musgrave and other prize-winning playwrights have shown that it is worth taking a risk with, and providing resources at scale for, the work of new artists, and demonstrated a confidence in new plays and in the audiences that come to see them.

Bruntwood and the North West:
by Andrew Sheridan

, which won a prize in 2008, was Andrew Sheridan’s first play as a writer. It combines an unflinching depiction of a cruel, damaged world (via the behaviour and language of its characters) with moments of sharp tender beauty, and shards of hope that are almost too hard to hold. Lyn Gardner, reviewing the first production in the , directed by Sarah Frankcom in the Exchange’s Studio (transferring to London’s Soho Theatre), called a ‘dense, difficult and brave’ play. Its movement across fifteen years of protagonist Oscar’s life means it’s non-naturalistic in its theatrical strategy and, although it’s oriented around a clear central figure, its social vision is expansive. There’s a poetry to its violence and horrors which allows it to shuttle between a tight focus on character and their wider situation.

The confidence of the play’s dialogue and voices owes a lot to Sheridan’s experience and craft as an established actor (particularly on stage, including at the Royal Exchange). Several other prize-winning writers including Nathan Queeley-Dennis, Fiona Peek, Gareth Farr, Luke Norris, Chris Urch and Rebecca Callard also came to writing as or after being actors, though their plays are wildly different from one another. Indeed, Callard played Helen in the first production of , before writing , which received a commendation in 2017 (and which she has adapted into a film). This connection highlights the fact that a growing awareness of the Bruntwood Prize – and of the writers who had been recognised by it – has become a significant driver for subsequent submissions to the prize.

The Mancunian genesis and location of the Bruntwood Prize matters in several ways. A writer-centred approach to and understanding of theatre-making has a long history in the UK. But from the establishment of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court in the 1950s and the development of London’s fringe theatres in the 1970s to the proliferation of ‘new writing’ in the 1990s, London has loomed large in the playwriting scene: for many, it has exerted a gravitational force. As Sarah Frankcom notes in her foreword to this volume, making Manchester another important hub for the development of plays and playwrights was a key ambition of both Bruntwood and the Royal Exchange. Reorienting or diversifying the map means that – though some Bruntwood Prize writers are London-based – a significant number of prize-winning plays come from right across the UK. Katherine Chandler’s and by Alan Harris (Judges’ Award winners in 2013 and 2015) are both set in Wales; Michael John O’Neill’s , which received the Original New Voice Award in 2019, is set in Northern Ireland. There is a strand of distinctly ‘Northern’ voices in the prize’s history, too: by Tim Foley, which won a Judges’ Award in 2017, is set in Northumberland. Alistair McDowall’s is set in Middlesbrough; Gareth Farr’s in Blackpool. Both won Judges’ Awards in 2011, the same year that , the most emphatically Mancunian of the...