ETPEP Award 2020 Longlist Announced

The Finborough Theatre today announces the longlist for the ETPEP Award 2020. The longlisted plays are:

• Let It Lie
• Mixed Feelings
• Normalcy
• Playfight
• Reasons You ShouldN't Love Me
• Tahara
• The Liberties
• The Tinker
• Doghouse
• Froggy

Labyrinth Diet

The award will be judged completely anonymously until the very final shortlist and interview stage, so the writers' names will not be announced until the winners are announced at the beginning of December 2020.

The ETPEP Award 2020 is a playwriting prize for new UK playwrights who work in the theatre industry, run by the Finborough Theatre in association with the Experienced Theatre Practitioners Early Playwriting Trust (ETPEP).

The Award's purpose is to find and nurture a playwright who has worked in theatre for two years or more (but not in a literary department setting or as a paid script reader), who is looking to further their ambitions and skill in the art and craft of playwriting.

The ETPEP Award 2020 is open to UK residents of any age who have not had a play professionally produced, and who have worked front of house, in administrative roles, on stage, backstage, lighting, design etc. or in a creative capacity in theatre for at least two years, either now or in the past. Brief feedback will be provided on every entry.

When the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown began, the ETPEP Award 2020 was near its original deadline, so we changed the rules of this year's competition to allow those in lockdown to enter by extending the deadline by three months, and by adding ten runner-up prizes of £300 each so that the money available could be spread more widely.

The winner will now receive a prize of £6,000, a development relationship with the Finborough Theatre including one-to-one dramaturgy with Finborough Theatre Artistic Director and playwright Neil McPherson; a rehearsal workshop with actors and a director to develop the play; and a staged reading performance of the winning play at the Finborough Theatre, London, as soon as the theatre is able to reopen. There will be ten runner-up prizes of £300 each.

The judges for the 2020 Award are playwright Winsome Pinnock; Artistic Director of the Finborough Theatre and playwright Neil McPherson; Literary Manager of the Finborough Theatre and playwright Sue Healy; actor Oliver Ford Davies; actor, playwright and activist Athena Stevens; and Clive Webster of the Experienced Theatre Practitioners Early Playwriting Trust, which founded the award.

The ETPEP Award is managed by the Finborough Theatre on behalf of a charitable trust, the Experienced Theatre Practitioners Early Playwriting Trust.

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