The Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting

The Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting is this country's biggest playwriting competition, attracting nearly 2200 entries this year, and it's based here in Manchester, at the Royal Exchange.

"This is very much Manchester showing the country, and the world, how to do it," believes Michael Oglesby, judge and Chairman of Bruntwood. "New work is the absolute lifeblood of the theatre. We understand that in Manchester and we take the chances. Manchester is a slightly edgy city and it likes to be like that! The unexpected, that's one of its strengths."

This year's winner of the £16,000 prize, Janice Okoh's Three Birds, was announced this week, along with three Judges' Awards of £8,000 each to Alistair McDowall (whose play 5.30 was in our very own 24:7 theatre festival not long ago) for Brilliant Adventures, Gareth Farr (who has worked at Green Room) for Britannia Waves The Rules, and Shadow Play by Louise Monaghan. They also all received a specially-commissioned trophy by the Manchester-based artist Nicola Dale, and an undertaking that they will be able to develop their plays for production at the Royal Exchange. Leading theatre publishers Nick Hern Books will publish all the produced plays.

By all accounts, the judges, chaired by the award-winning Stockport-raised playwright Simon Stephens and also including actors Maxine Peake and Sue Johnston as well as writer Jackie Kay and Exchange Artistic Director Sarah Frankcom, had an, erm, "energetic" debate, lasting more than six exhausting hours, over which of the ten short-listed plays should go forward.

"That was simply because the standard was so high that the judges really did not want particular pieces of work to be left out," enthuses Simon. He also points out that his own play The Sleep Of The Just "didn't even get on the long-list for a similar award many years ago, and I remember that sense of injustice, anger, disappointment and doubt I felt. So it's important that all the other 2,178 playwrights who didn't make it to the shortlist remember that The Bruntwood Prize is a really significant intervention but, as a career, playwriting can't be a competition. The measure of a playwright's career is how they deal with difficulty. So go and write another, then another…"

That remarkably high standard and enthusiasm was, he says, "really, really energising and it's fascinating to think about why that is. Look at the great eras of theatrical history - look at the Trojan Wars, look at the furious expansion of London in the sixteenth century, or at pre-Revolutionary Russia. People have always written great drama in times of great fear or great transition. So at a time when we're constantly being told how fragile the economy is and when there are frightening discrepancies between the people whose actions directly caused that fragility and those who are suffering as a result, it's not a surprise that people are feeling dramatic and have a sense of injustice. All of the plays we read had a ferocious energy to them and some were bracingly angry, which I thought was really exciting."

"Since the first prize competition in 2005, we have now created a national brand that adds a lot, not just to theatre but to the artistic scene of the country," adds Mike.  "Of course doing new work, instead of the safe option of sponsoring another production of Romeo and Juliet, is high risk. But if you get it right it's wonderful and we are delighted to have been the catalyst for such a wonderful variety of creative writing. In these harsh economic times, it is essential that companies provide the stimulus and support for the arts and the Bruntwood is a wonderful example of the rewards that come from real corporate involvement in the theatre."

*The 2013 Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting will launch in Autumn of next year and open for entries in January 2013.