2011 Winners & Shortlist

When Piret wakes one morning with a Russian stranger in her bed, her flat and family are thrown into confusion. It’s 1989 and Soviet Estonia is crumbling around her and her son Tonü. With a husband whose disappearance the authorities won’t explain, Piret embarks on a campaign to find out the truth, whilst Tonü makes friends with the stranger who’s come to stay.

Tim Luscombe trained as a director at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Directing credits include: The Merchant of Venice & Volpone (Lyric Hammersmith, World Tour); Artist Descending A Staircase (Helen Hayes New York, Duke of York’s London); When She Danced (Kings Head London, Playwrights’ Horizons New York); Easy Virtue (Garrick); Snow Orchid and Salvation (both at the Gate London); The Browning Version & Harlequinade (Royalty), Intimate Exchanges (Scarborough, 59E59 New York). Tim started writing full time six years ago. Productions of his plays include: EuroVision (Drill Hall & Vaudeville); The One You Love (Royal Court & Barracke Berlin); The Death of Gogol and the 1969 Eurovision Song Contest (Drill Hall); The Schuman Plan (Hampstead), Hungry Ghosts (Orange Tree), and adaptations of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.

A working time machine?

Definitely.

What have you done with it?

N…Nothing.

Nothing?

It just…sits there.

Nineteen year old science genius Luke is holed up in a dingy flat on a near-abandoned Middlesbrough housing estate. He finally has some peace to work on the extraordinary box in his living room. But when he’s introduced to a wealthy out-of-towner by his unbalanced brother Rob, tensions build and a battle is set in motion that threatens to tear the brothers apart and unleash the power inside his invention.

Alistair McDowall is a writer from the North East of England. Previous plays include Plain Jane, Some Stories, 5:30 and eighteen stupid reasons why i love you lots and lots. He has been a writer-on-attachment at the Royal Court Theatre and is currently on attachment with Paines Plough.

I joined the army because I couldn’t get a job on civvy street, couldn’t get one, didn’t want one. I didn’t want to get stuck in a down, brown, empty old town, I didn’t want to be working for the weekend and wasting the week. I wanted more.

Dirty old Blackpool is the dead end that Carl needs to escape. It’s the home of his broken father, old pubs and the boys who sell drugs from the British Legion. The army and Afghanistan offer him the chance to be anything he wants, but it’s a bargain that brings him back to Blackpool a different man.

Gareth Farr has been working as a professional actor for the past eleven years, working with the RSC, The Royal Court, Young Vic and in the West End. He has been part of the Royal Court Writers Programme and Super Group and had worked developed and performed at The Green Room Studio Theatre in Manchester. Gareth has also written for the Tristan Bates Ignition scheme and has since been invited to develop his work for them into a full production. Britannia Waves the Rules is his first full length play.

It’s 1999 and the summer of the United Treble, Daryl’s come out of prison and he’s got plans for the gang who’ve been waiting for him. As Moss Side heats up and United keep winning, Daryl’s ambition hits the street corner and pulls him and everyone around him towards a danger he can’t control.

Curtis Cole is an actor based in Manchester. He has numerous theatre credits performing up and down the country at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Royal Court London, Birmingham Rep, Ipswich Wolsey as well as going abroad to the Sydney Opera House. He has also been a regular feature at his local theatre Contact. It was at the Contact where his writing career began, he was young writer in residence in 2005 completing a one hour play Face Front. Since then he has been a regular winner at Contact’s monthly script competition Verbally Challenged and was co-writer of Action Transports play Night Train which had two successful schools tours. Climbing Snakes is his first full length play.

Van Vechten is a small American town in Southwest Michigan. It’s Aimee’s home, but something has set her against the community, at odds with her mother, the church and sometimes with the world. As outsiders investigate what happened on the day she brought a gun to church, we follow Aimee around the town that she wants to escape.

Silva Semerciyan is a native of Michigan; she moved to the UK in 1998. While at university, she wrote Another Man’s Son which won the 2010 William Saroyan Prize for Playwriting. Her other stage works include Full English and Reality, a satirical musical for which she wrote the book and lyrics. In spring 2012, her short play, Stalemate, will be presented at the ReOrient Festival in San Francisco. She holds a BA in English from the University of Michigan and an MPhil in Playwriting from the University of Birmingham. She currently lectures in Drama and English in Bristol.

Jamie is Alice’s first boyfriend and she couldn’t be happier. Their dates in the park are everything that she’s dreamed of, but no one’s sure how Jamie feels. It’s up to jealous Fi and his sister Liv to stop him from making a fool of himself, because everyone knows that Alice is crazy.

Miriam Battye grew up in Manchester and has been a theatre lover her whole life. She started writing bad poetry during her teenage years before trying her hand at writing for stage. At the age of seventeen she was accepted onto The Twelve playwriting programme at the Royal Exchange and since then has written avidly. Currently studying at Bristol University she has been lucky enough to have her work staged in productions and rehearsed readings at her university union in Bristol and the Bristol Old Vic Basement. She is also a stage technician and aspiring director.

Tjay and George are growing up in a hectic world, making plans for the future and chatting up girls, until one moment on the street after school everything suddenly stops. As Tjay replays things in his head and works out what to do next, the gun that killed George bursts into life and his grandma sits at home waiting for him to come back from school.

Cornell S John’s film credits as an actor include: Curtis in the hit urban youth dramas, Kidulthood and Adulthood. Glenstorm in The Chronicles of Narnia – Prince Caspian and Lawrence in the soon to be released Dreams of a life. Some of his West End theatre credits include: Javert in Les Miserable, Crown in Porgy and Bess, Horse in The full Monty, and he Originated the role of King Mufasa in The Lion King. He played Satan in Steven Berkoff’s Messiah, Malcolm X in The Meeting and Clay in Dutchman. Born in Handsworth, Birmingham, One Look is Cornell’s first stage play and was written in response to the challenges facing young people today.

I have to explain it to you. That’s me in the middle. Then there’s me Nanna and me Grandad, yeah…Then there’s me mam up there. And you.

Katie is eleven, watching films after tea and learning shadow puppets from her grandad. But something happened in the past and it’s not gone away. Katie’s mother is dead and her father’s in prison and she’s starting to act up. It’s for her grandparents to decide whether she should meet the man who changed her life forever.

Louise Monaghan has just received her first commission for BBC Radio 4’s Afternoon Play.  Directed and produced by Jessica Dromgoole, Alone in the Garden with You will be broadcast next summer. In 2006, Louise was nominated by The Bush Theatre for The Fifty, a new writing initiative run by The Royal Court in conjunction with the BBC. Her play Beautiful, was nominated by Out of Joint for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize 2009.  She was a finalist for both The London Fringe Festival’s Theatre Writing Award 2010 and Little Brother Productions Big Opportunity 2011 with her play Aurora. She lives on the South Coast with her husband Mike. They have two sons, James and William and a Lakeland terrier called Bruce.

At first, I wouldn’t have thought anyone was in. Your curtains. The way you have them drawn. You always keep them like that?

Tiana’s in charge at home. She’s got to look after brother Tionne and little sister Tanika. As they negotiate school and cooking at home, something strange is going on. Their mother has gone and Tionne’s experiments are getting stranger and stranger. As the outside world starts to ask what’s happened, Tiana tries to keep the siblings together, even when a teacher comes to call.

Janice Okoh was born, raised and lives in South East London. She has a background in law and worked in the city for 7 years. She has been writing in one form or another since she was 14 years old when she used to dream of becoming a romantic fiction writer.  Her first play was written in 2008 as part of an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and has yet to be produced. Three Birds is her second full-length theatre play. Janice has had work produced for radio and currently teaches English as a Foreign Language.

Derek and Molly have done alright, they have a business, a son in the army and their youngest, Danny, is just about to start work with his old man on an apprenticeship. But Derek’s been hiding letters by the hundred, Danny has a new girlfriend he won’t bring home and a Canadian businessman has put in an offer on the business that Derek isn’t telling the lads about. As the fractures in the family start to appear Derek is forced to decide whether the past is more important than the future.

Kenneth Emson was born in Essex in 1983. He has written many plays for fringe venues in London as well as having work premier at the High Tide, Hot Ink, Hotbed, Latitude and Pulse theatre Festivals. In 2008 he took part in the Old Vic 24 Hour Play event and has continued to work with them through their US/UK Exchange and Ignite programmes. He is currently one of the BBC Writersroom 10 (with the Old Vic as his partner theatre) and the 2011 BBC Writers Academy.