Plays submitted by the National Theatre, the Almeida and the Royal Shakespeare Company are among the finalists for this year’s Susan Smith Blackburn prize for female, transgender and non-binary playwrights.
The international playwriting award, now in its 47th year, has a shortlist of nine scripts. The National’s submission is Inter Alia, about a judge whose son is accused of rape. The play will be staged this summer in the Lyttelton theatre, starring Rosamund Pike in the lead role. It is written by Australian playwright Suzie Miller, who had a hit with her previous legal drama, Prima Facie, starring Jodie Comer.
The Almeida is represented by Otherland, which opens at the north London theatre this month. Written by Chris Bush, whose previous productions include the Sheffield musical Standing at the Sky’s Edge, it is billed as an exploration of “what it means to be true to yourself in the face of unstoppable change”. The cast includes Jade Anouka and Fizz Sinclair.
The RSC has already staged the script it submitted for the prize. Playwright Isobel McArthur, best known for her raucous Jane Austen riff Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of), directed her version of The Fair Maid of the West as a Christmas show in the Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in 2023. It is a musical updating of Thomas Heywood’s 17th-century play of the same name. The Guardian’s David Jays wrote that McArthur had made “a rollicking new romp from a baggy old play”.
Other plays on the shortlist offer fresh takes on classic tales. BÁN by Carys Coburn, submitted by Dublin’s Abbey theatre, is inspired by Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba and set in 1980s Ireland. The Janeiad by Anna Ziegler, submitted by the Alley theatre in Houston, draws on the Odyssey, with Penelope becoming New Yorker Jane, whose husband left home 20 years ago.
The remaining finalists, chosen from more than 200 submissions, are 49 Days, a play about grief by Haruna Lee, submitted by Playwrights Horizons in New York; An Oxford Man by Else Went, about “the first ‘modern’ transgender man”, from South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California; Furlough’s Paradise by ak payne, charting the relationship between two cousins (Alliance theatre of Atlanta); and Keiko Green’s “genre-defying” You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World (UC San Diego MFA Playwriting Programme).
The winner will be announced on 10 March and awarded $25,000 and a signed print by Willem de Kooning. The judges are: costume designer Linda Cho; actors Indira Varma and Jennifer Ehle; Nancy Medina, artistic director of the Bristol Old Vic; playwright Mark Ravenhill; and George Strus, who founded the new work development and community building hub Breaking the Binary theatre in New York.
Past winners of the prize include Annie Baker, Caryl Churchill and Lynn Nottage. Last year, it was won by Ava Pickett’s “very funny and very angry” play 1536, which follows three women as they discuss the arrest of Anne Boleyn. 1536 opens at the Almeida in May.
