Niamh Cusack is an Irish actress. Born to a family with deep roots in the performing arts, Cusack has been involved as a performer since a young age. She has served with the UK's two leading theatre companies, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre and has performed in a long line of major stage productions since the mid-1980s. She has made numerous appearances on television including a long-running role as Dr. Kate Rowan in the UK series Heartbeat (1992–1995) which made her a household name and favourite. She has often worked as a voice actress on radio, and her film credits include a starring role in In Love with Alma Cogan (2011).
Chloë Moss is an English playwright and screenwriter.
David Greig is a Scottish playwright and theatre director. His work has been performed at many of the major theatres in Britain, including the Traverse Theatre, Royal Court Theatre, Royal National Theatre, Royal Lyceum Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and been produced around the world.
Ben Ellis is a playwright from Gippsland in Australia, now based in both London and Melbourne. His significant works include Post Felicity (2001), Falling Petals (2002), a stage adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (2005), and more recently Poet No. 7 (2006) and The Final Shot, both premiering in London. The Final Shot, about the television broadcast of a man's death, featured Susannah York. His latest play, The Captive, explores the folklore surrounding the supposed capture of a white woman by aboriginal people in East Gippsland.
Zawedde Emma "Zawe" Ashton is an English actress, narrator, playwright, and director. She is best known for her roles in the comedy dramas Fresh Meat and Not Safe for Work, the Netflix horror thriller film Velvet Buzzsaw and for her portrayal of Joyce Carol Vincent in Dreams of a Life (2011). She will join the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a villain in The Marvels (2023).
Leo Butler is a British playwright. His plays have been staged, among others, by the Royal Court, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Almeida Theatre. His plays have been published by Bloomsbury A & C Black. His 2001 play Redundant won the George Devine Award. Between 2005 and 2014 he was Playwriting Tutor for the Royal Court Young Writers Programme.
John Stephen Gerrard Jeffreys was a British playwright and playwriting teacher. He wrote original plays, films and play adaptations and also worked as translator. Jeffreys is best known for his play The Libertine about the Earl of Rochester, which was performed at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago with John Malkovich as Rochester, and later adapted into a film starring Malkovich and Johnny Depp.
Phil Porter is a British playwright, librettist and television writer. He is a graduate of the University of Birmingham.
Alan Harris is a Welsh playwright.
Mogadishu is the debut play by ex-school teacher Vivienne Franzmann concerning a white teacher who tries to protect her black student from expulsion after he pushes her to the ground. In order to protect himself, the student lies and drags her into a vortex of lies in which victim becomes perpetrator. The play was first produced by Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester before it was transferred to the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, London. It was one of four joint winners of the Bruntwood Playwriting Competition in 2008 and the George Devine Award for most promising playwright in 2011.
Vivienne Franzman is a British playwright from Walthamstow, whose first play, Mogadishu, was critically acclaimed on its première at the Royal Exchange, Manchester and on its transference to the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith in 2011. Dominic Cavendish of The Telegraph called it "the play of the year". The play, based on her own experiences as a school teacher, starred Julia Ford as a teacher victimised by a student's lies after she tries to protect him.
Tom Holloway is an Australian playwright, based in Melbourne as of May 2015.
Zinnie Harris FRSE is a British playwright, screenwriter and director currently living in Edinburgh. She has been commissioned and produced by the Royal Court Theatre, Royal National Theatre, the National Theatre of Scotland and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her work is translated and performed in many countries.
Clare Lizzimore is a British theatre director and writer. Her production of 'Bull' by Mike Bartlett, won 'Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre' at the 2015 Olivier Awards. Lizzimore has been resident director at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, and staff director at the Royal National Theatre.
Phoebe Eclair-Powell is a British playwright from South-East London. Her plays include WINK (Theatre503) and One Under. As an actress, she appeared in Peckham: The Soap Opera at the Royal Court. Her play Fury was a finalist for the Verity Bargate Award at Soho Theatre In the summer of 2016, Eclair Powell had three new shows running: Fury, at Soho Theatre, Torch at Underbelly and Epic Love and Pop Songs at Pleasance, both at the Edinburgh Fringe. In 2019, Eclair Powell won the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting for her play Shed: Exploded View.
Chris Urch is an English playwright. He trained at the Drama Centre as an actor, before turning to writing plays. His first full-length play Land of Our Fathers, set in a Welsh coalmine on the eve of the 1979 general election, received wide critical acclaim when it opened at Theatre503 in London in 2013. The play then transferred to the Trafalgar Theatre in the West End, before launching on a national tour.
The Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting is a British competition for playwriting, the largest of its kind in Europe—in 2019 it received 2561 entries. Since its inception in 2005, more than 15,000 scripts have been entered, £304,000 has been awarded to 34 prize-winning writers, and 24 winning productions have been staged in 38 UK-wide venues. In 2015 the prize celebrated its 10th anniversary and is now recognised as a launch-pad for some of the country's most respected and produced playwrights. The Prize is awarded to scripts that are original and unperformed. The award is a joint venture between the property company Bruntwood and the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester the Prize is an opportunity for writers of any background and experience to enter unperformed plays to be judged by a panel of industry experts for a chance to win part of a prize fund totalling £40,000.
Anna Jordan is an English playwright, director, screenwriter and acting tutor. Her work has been presented at The Royal Court, Royal Exchange (Manchester) and internationally, with several productions of her plays in the United States and Germany, versions in Sweden, Ireland and productions planned in New Zealand, Canada and Turkey.
Duncan Macmillan is an English playwright and director. He is most noted for his plays Lungs, People, Places and Things, Every Brilliant Thing, and the stage adaptation of the George Orwell novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he co-adapted and co-directed with Robert Icke.
Sarah Grochala is a British playwright. Her plays have been performed at the Finborough Theatre, Theatre503, Hampstead Theatre, Arcola Theatre and Soho Theatre in London. Her plays have been produced internationally by the Griffin Theatre, Sydney, Tiyatro Yan Etki Istanbul, Turkey and on the Toronto Fringe Toronto Fringe Festival, Canada. Her book on playwriting, The Contemporary Political Play, was published in 2017.
