Playwriting Showcase 2026 by MA Playwriting

Director Pooja Sivaraman
Cast tba

OCPM spans six decades, four generations, and three continents to detail the greatest scientific failure in modern history: the fight for the male contraceptive pill, from the women who fought for and failed it.

Elliana Craig was born in London under a full moon. She has staged three original works in site-specific locations, one of which went on to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She’s trained and worked in writing and directing in France, New York and Berlin. She writes skewed plays about strange people.

Approximate length: 80-90 minutes
Content warnings: tba
Age guidance: tba

Director Mumba Dodwell
Cast tba

Deadly Nightshade is a centuries old plant used for murder, seduction or control. In Cambridge 1963, it’s placed into the hands of a young Black couple from the Bahamas. This new world of high academia is intoxicating, offering a life of prestige and praise. A promotion brings a celebratory dinner that turns into a ritual of power. David Lennox -the university’s celebrated star researcher chooses Mary (our protagonist) as his new subject. The sticky green smooth of the drug tastes of obedience and promise; she is transformed. Entranced. Happy?

Wallis Meghan Rolle is a multidisciplinary artist from Nassau, Bahamas. Her work is bold, centred around finding liberating ways to present the collective history and future of the diaspora across all mediums. With a BFA in Dramatic Arts from The New School in New York City she has a clear artistic instinct and vision. Her career thus far has a dedicated focus on writing for the performer, marrying her extensive acting training from institutions such as Juilliard, Yale and the New York Film Academy with a MA in Playwriting from RADA.

Approximate length: 80-90 minutes
Content warnings: use of racial slurs, blood, and violence, contains strong language as well as mentions of sex.
Age guidance: 13+

Director Lucy Morrison
Cast tba

A political family falls apart: father’s career takes off while mother’s is going down the drain. Tired of being a lightning rod that catches the blows her parents strike at each other, Joanna sets out to find the truth that hides where public meets the private.

Dorottya Farkas is a London-based writer and theatre-maker from Budapest. Dancing on the borderline of different cultural mindsets, her work combines practices from contemporary Western theatre with a sensibility rooted in European traditions. She’s an outsider. On the go. Always in motion.

Approximate length: 80 minutes
Content warnings: verbal and emotional abuse, entions of domestic violence.
Age guidance: 18+

Director Daniel Goldman
Cast tba

What happens the moment before a life-changing decision?

Kathryn, Ravi, Stewart and Harry are stuck between futures, agonising over whether they’re ready or even worthy of becoming parents. As they wrestle with each other and themselves, potential children step out of possibility and onto the stage, all tantalisingly alive at the moment of indecision.

A funny, unsettling new play about roots, and what it takes to become a forest.

David Djemal was born in Jerusalem to a Syrian father and a British mother.

Queer and Orthodox, Arab and Jewish, David finds joy in writing from the points of friction between his identities, rather than shying away from them.

He wants to hold truth. Distil it. Interrogate it. Relish its tensions. He takes himself way too seriously, but tries to remember it's not that serious. It's just stories, you know? Then again, what else is there?

Approximate length: 80-90 minutes
Content warnings: contains strong language throughout, including one homophobic slur (spoken in jest). The play discusses sex, fertility, pregnancy, and reproductive choice, and contains direct expressions of suicidal ideation.
Age guidance:  16+

Director Arianna Muñoz
Cast tba

Echo hasn’t been able to leave the house in a hundred days. So she visits a cyberbrothel.

Oscar’s older boyfriend has just cheated on him again. So he visits a cyberbrothel.

Victor’s had to work for everything he has in life, and that isn’t enough. So he visits a cyberbothel.

Romeo thinks, because of his money, he’ll never know unconditional love. So he visits a cyberbrothel.

Sierra is not real. Sierra is a doll, with more scars than skin, who tells you that she loves you no matter what. So she stays in the Cyberbrothel.

Horatio Holloway is a playwright. Ish. From London. Ish. Part of the inaugural MA Playwriting cohort at RADA, they are due to be Trinity College, Cambridge’s writer-in-residence for 2026-27. At 21, they have had seven plays staged between London and Edinburgh Fringe, most recently I CAN’T STOP THE LONELINESS at The Hen & Chickens Theatre. They specialise in magical realist theatre - confronting naturalistic contexts with mystical subversions - with a particular interest in liminalities; the betwixt and between of gender, mental health and the existential self.

Approximate length: 80-90 minutes
Content warnings: discussions of rape, depictions of sexual violence, depictions of strangulation, verbal abuse, misogyny, internalised homophobia, reference to Christian nationalism, allusions to paedophilia, other sexual content, references to gun violence, genital mutilation, grief and trauma.
Age guidance: 16+

Director Zhaoyi Ying

Set in a seaside apartment kitchen, Chicken Dropping is a savage, funny chamber comedy about a Chinese middle-class couple whose comfortable routine is unsettled by a war between neighbouring chickens. It is a play about the spectators of war: those who refresh the news, take a side, then sit down to eat.

Dongmeng Chen is a playwright, dramaturg and comedian trained in Chinese opera and contemporary theatre, working on pressing against censorship. Her award-recognised, nationally-funded black comedies such as Chang Cheng Yao, Wan Xiang Gui Chun and When We Run, We Do Crosstalk, place ordinary Chinese lives at the centre of the age's largest social issues.

Approximate length: 45-50 minutes
Content warnings: contains abuse, animal cruelty and death, strong language, use of fake blood, sudden noise, sustained unsettling sound.
Age guidance: 16+

Director Lucy Morrison
Cast tba

Blackfriars, 1587. In a dingy pub basement, a troupe of boys rehearse Galatea, a play about girls dressing up as boys. As their performance approaches, teenagers James and Samuel must reckon with how their own gender, desire and performance blur, and navigate queer identities in a world where boys must play at being women to be seen.

Maariya Khalid is a London-born and bred playwright and poet. Her work ranges from intimate, contemporary dramas to ambitious, historical narratives. At 22, she refuses to put herself in a box and is passionate about challenging how South Asian women are represented in theatre, both on and off stage. She is no stranger to the Fringe circuit, as her work has been performed in Edinburgh and Camden, and she aims to establish herself as a bold new voice in British theatre.

Approximate length: 80-90 minutes
Content warnings: sexual abuse, misogyny, child abuse, emetophobia, kidnapping, violence, alcohol use.
Age guidance: 12+