A playwright who was contemplating a “full profession change” due to the Covid-19 pandemic’s devastating affect on the humanities has been introduced because the winner of this yr’s Ladies’s prize for playwriting.
Karis Kelly gained the prize for Consumed, a drama about 4 generations of Northern Irish ladies at a ninetieth birthday celebration in a “home filled with hungry ghosts”. Kelly, who has been writing performs since 2008, stated “like many others within the arts, in the course of the pandemic, I had an entire disaster of religion … So to go from that time to receiving recognition from such an incredible prize and panel of judges is genuinely a dream come true.”
Literary agent Mel Kenyon chaired the judging panel, which included the Guardian’s chief theatre critic Arifa Akbar, playwright Lucy Kirkwood and Physician Who star Jodie Whittaker.
The award, now in its second yr, is important “in as we speak’s theatre ecology”, stated Kelly, who acquired the prize of £12,000 at a ceremony on Thursday on the London Library. “We actually do want programmes that spotlight feminine and female-identifying voices. I’m so proud to be part of its legacy.”
Greater than 850 scripts had been entered for the prize, which is produced by Ellie Keel and the touring theatre firm Paines Plough. Keel referred to as Consumed “heat, humorous, deft and sharply noticed”, and added: “We’ve bought a great distance nonetheless to go when it comes to parity between female and male writers on main phases and I hope that the distinctive performs introduced collectively underneath the banner of this prize show that there’s no scarcity of expertise: solely, in some locations, a reluctance to recognise it or give it an opportunity.” Katie Posner and Charlotte Bennett, joint creative administrators of Paines Plough, stated that they had referred to as one another after studying Consumed and located that they had “each been howling with laughter, moved and shocked all inside the first 10 pages”.
Consumed is ready to be programmed in 2023. In 2020, the prize’s inaugural yr, two scripts gained: Amy Trigg’s Causes You Ought to(n’t) Love Me, which was later staged on the Kiln theatre in London, and Ahlam’s You Bury Me, which had a staged studying throughout final yr’s Edinburgh worldwide pageant.