Cumbernauld Theatre Company is pleased to announce an open call for submissions for the Scotland Short Play Award 2019-2020. The award is designed both to encourage new and early career playwrights as well as encouraging established playwrights who wish to explore new forms of contemporary Scottish drama, theatre and performance.

The award also encourages submissions form writers who usually work in other literary forms and who are interested in the potential of the stage, and those from backgrounds and communities whose voices are not usually heard on stages in Scotland.

Criteria 

• The Award is less concerned with the commercial potential of the work. They actively seek to encourage risk and innovation in play writing and performance writing forms, storytelling, theatre structure and characters.
• To submit, writers must be aged 18+ and ordinarily resident in Scotland. If you are currently working outside of Scotland on a temporary basis then you are still eligible to apply.
• Writers are invited to submit a short play/performance text lasting between 10 and 15 minutes- a typical rule-of-thumb is that a play-script runs at approximately 1m 30s per page. A 10 minute performance is therefore likely to be approximately 7 script pages long and likewise a 15 minute play would be approximately 10 pages long. So, as a rule of thumb, your play-script should be between 7 and 10 pages in length (not including any title page or information pages etc.). But please do note: this number of pages is provided as a guide only. Your own reading-aloud of the text will give you a more accurate sense of its likely duration as different kinds of density of text, or even simply things like differing page layouts, can mean the number of pages rule-of-thumb is significantly different.
• Your play should require no more than 3 actors.
• They’re excluding the use of headphones, virtual reality headsets, aerial work, and other relatively high production value decisions.

Deadline

31st March 2020 at 5pm

There are likely to be up to 5 Joint Award Winners, although this is subject to the number of submissions and the appropriate stage of development of the scripts. In the event of no plays being selected, the Award call will be repeated in the immediately following year.
Award recipients will each receiving a pro-rata fee based on the current FST/SSP Playwrights Commission Rate.
Alongside the appointment of the Award, the Playwright will also receive support and mentoring throughout the project.
The selected productions may be presented by Cumbernauld Theatre Company in late 2020 or early 2021.

http://www.cumbernauldtheatre.co.uk/scotland-short-play-award-2019/