News
Kings Cross Award 2016
13th June 2016
We are delighted to announce the 2016 shortlist for the King’s Cross New Writing Award.
Congratulations to each of the playwrights whose work is listed below:
O Do Not Love Too Long
Before Rory can go looking for his past, it turns up to haunt him. Sean is content to get drunk and have lines from Yeats tattooed onto his backside, but Rory, realising that his glory days as a musician in London are long since behind him, begins to pine for Ireland. By chance, his ex-lover and his daughter arrive from Dublin within days of each other, setting the men on a path to jealousy and violence.
The Fall of a Sparrow
Mr Charles is a Punch and Judy enthusiast who likes hanging around by the playground in Finsbury Park. When a little girl goes missing and is found murdered, it does not take long for his behaviour to be called into question. Yet the relationship he has struck up with another child is endearing, protective and, on his part, completely begrudging.
The Onion Game
Pearl and Onion’s marriage is strained, to say the least. Onion is an onion-farmer who longs to be a novelist. He is writing a book called “The Onion Game”, while Pearl decorates the house with glass beads. The stakes are raised when Onion is given six months to finish his book, and he decides to pay his son, Ogie, to pretend to have Leukaemia so as to keep his wife distracted. As both parents lavish gifts on their ham-actor son, the situation descends into farce, with disastrous consequences for their younger, less noticed child.
The Goofos Present
The Goofos are a cabaret act made up of Scott and Zelda. Somewhere between the ballet dancing, trumpet-playing and silent movie showings of their act, their relationship takes hold. Based on the real-life marriage of F Scott Fitzgerald, the play exploits the gap between public persona and private life: as the one takes off, the other spirals out of control.
Wake
A cacophony of voices gives way to disjointed conversations in and around the present and not-so-distant future. In a world in which women occupy the upper echelons of power, misogyny and rape denial are now subversive. And in a world in which technology pervades almost every interaction, online trolling can lead to real life calamity.
The shortlist will now be considered by a panel of industry professionals, and the winner will be announced on Monday the 20th of June
