Rochdale Playwriting Competition

Rochdale Literature and Ideas Festival, M6 Theatre Company and Touchstones are working in partnership to launch a new playwriting competition for young people aged 14-25 who live in Rochdale Borough. Entrants must be resident in one of the 4 Rochdale Townships. (Heywood, Middleton, Rochdale and Pennines).

The winning writer will be mentored by award-winning playwright Nicola Schofield to develop their script into a 30 minute play.

Nicola is a regular contributing writer on DOCTORS for BBC One. Nicola’s first play MAYBE TOMORROW won the Write#2 Playwright competition – a forerunner to the Bruntwood Prize – at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester in May 2004 and was performed in the Studio Theatre in July of the same year, directed by Jo Combes. The play was also nominated for Best New Play at the MEN Theatre Awards 2004.

The winner will have their play performed by professional actors; it will tour for one week to some of Rochdale’s high schools and to venues including M6 Studio Theatre and Touchstones Studio Theatre during the 2018 Rochdale Literature and Ideas Festival in October.

 

How to apply 

Writers should submit the first 10 pages of the script and an outline of the rest of the plot (no more than one side of A4). Writers can only submit one script. It must be a Word document formatted with a 12 point font. The play should be interesting and relevant to and suitable for young people in Year 7 and 8.

The play should be suitable to be performed by 2 actors (they can multi-role if it suits the style of your piece, please indicate this clearly in your submission) and have minimal props and set. The play needs to be easy to tour and fit into a school drama studio. The script must be an original, unperformed and unproduced piece of work.

  1. The script must be the first 10 pages which can be developed in to a piece which is 30 minutes long in playing time.
  2. The winning entrant will receive 2 sessions with a professional playwright to redraft their entry.
  3. The winning entrant agrees to participate in reasonable publicity relating to this competition.
  4. On completion of the tour, all rights to future productions of the winning entry will remain with the writer.

Your name should not appear anywhere on the script as the competition will be judged anonymously but only on the first cover page. A panel of industry professionals and young people will select the winning entry.

 

Deadlines 

Closing date for submissions: Friday, 6 July 2018 at 5pm

Winner announced: Thursday, 12 July 2018

First draft: Friday, 10 August 2018

Second draft: Monday, 26 August 2018

Final draft: Friday, 7 September 2018

 

Published on:
5 Jun 2018