Phoebe Eclair-Powell has won the 2019 Bruntwood prize for playwriting with a searing experimental drama based on Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter. Parker’s installation presented the contents of a shed blown apart by the British army and frozen as if mid-explosion. Eclair-Powell’s starkly violent play, Shed: Exploded View, which borrows the subheader of Parker’s 1991 artwork, is described by the playwright as “an explosion in action”.
The play opens with fireworks and a New Year’s Eve marriage proposal. Or rather, that is the first scene presented in the script, but Eclair-Powell states: “This is one order in which the scenes can work. The scenes each have titles, so that, if the director and actors wanted to, they could reorder the scenes to fit their production.” The play spans 30 years in the lives of three couples and comprises many short scenes that keep the audience guessing about the connections between characters and how the stories fit together. Eclair-Powell receives £16,000 in prize money and will develop the script with Manchester’s Royal Exchange theatre, where the awards ceremony was held on Monday.
Bryony Shanahan, recently appointed joint artistic director at the Royal Exchange and one of the judges for the prize, said the shortlisted plays had “kept us debating for hours”. She described Shed: Exploded View as “precise and considered, a beautiful tapestry of ideas meticulously woven together, but also astonishingly emotional”. The play, she said, “deals with themes of female trauma with dignity, offering hope to her characters and the audience along the way”.
Eclair-Powell, the daughter of comedian Jenny Eclair, has written several plays including Fury, an updated take on Medea; Torch, which she described as a “celebration of womanhood”; and Epic Love and Pop Songs, a piece of gig-theatre about teenage friendship featuring tracks by Patti Smith and Miley Cyrus.
Shed: Exploded View is the overall winner of the Bruntwood prize. The judges award went to Glee & Me by Stuart Slade; the “original new voice” award for debut writers was won by Michael John O’Neill for his play Akedah; and the international award went to New York-based writer Kimber Lee for the strikingly named Untitled F*ck Miss Sa*gon Play (Srsly This Is Not the Title), which addresses Asian stereotypes in the US entertainment industry.
There were 2,561 entries to the 2019 Bruntwood prize – the highest number of submissions to date for the biennial prize and a 35% increase in entries from 2017. The jury was chaired by the Young Vic’s artistic director, Kwame Kwei-Armah. Former prizewinner Anna Jordan and the Guardian journalist Bridget Minamore were among the jurors.
Minamore said that Shed: Exploded View “plays with form, but not in a way that feels pretentious or gratuitous. Its stage directions claim the scenes could work in any order, so, as soon as I had read it from beginning to end, I read the scenes again, but backwards, and that’s when I had a feeling we’d found the winner. It’s such an ambitious and painful exploration of domestic violence and gender and family, and the precision and subtlety in the language really struck me.
“Overall, I was surprised most by how many stories on the shortlist I knew would immediately have an audience if they were staged tomorrow.”
Other previous winners of the Bruntwood prize include Katherine Soper and Duncan Macmillan.
