Recommended by Alice Josephs

With a cast of six and simple to stage, this hard hitting people smuggler drama maps a brutal world where the USA has fragmented into a third world country with the dollar worthless. McCants ruthlessly charts the implications of gangland expediency in a shifting global marketplace where life is cheap and democratic ideals unaffordable luxuries. Posing difficult questions of the audience whether the hitherto unimaginable is possible, this is a skilfully woven hair shirt of a play nevertheless laced with humour and humanity.

A neat little comedy where a little old lady ‘Ladykillers’-style finds herself unwittingly involved in a jewellery shop heist. With clever, simple staging for three locations, plenty of physical as well as verbal comedy, this is a jam packed short. Plenty also for versatile actors to grab hold of as the torturously funny blunders and misdirections escalate in a classic British farce.

An exceptionally clever and affecting dial up connection conversation across time. The lives of those living through the fast moving changes caused by the internet are charted in this pacey short. An Instant Message would play equally well on radio or as a podcast with the family background and stories introduced in a natural manner yet in a surreal situation. Dwyer has an ear for capturing the nuances of children’s and adult dialogue and for succinct storytelling in this wistful tale of the cyber generation.

A row over an iced up window escalates to reveal sexual betrayal in this subtle college drama short. Dzubak manages to convey viscerally the over wrought relationship between college friends caught between heightened teen emotions and adulthood, still inexperienced in life. Unlike the more usual college comedy, this gives two younger actors and a director the chance to bring Chekhovian tragedy to a plausible modern setting. Using metaphor cleverly and seamlessly, the playwright makes the audience feel the angst, creating a theatrical yet very real situation, where neither youngster is truly a villain.

A dark and powerful satire where the sense of a Jeeves-like butler can never prevail. With so much avoidable destruction permeating life globally, this grotesquely accurate metaphor skewers a deregulated world in the shape of a power mad, nonsensical mistress and the man servant left with no choice but to submit. Two fantastically deranged characters play out a very 21st century health and safety tale in the midst of Victorian excess and collapsing buildings.

Goddamnit, you got symptoms? Then you need a diagnosis! In just 60 seconds, Evan Baughfman turns the traditional doctor patient relationship on its head, a consultation invaded by the democratic creative writing hordes. With one character demanding the metamorphosis of a composed professional and the other turning everything - just everything! - into hopefully publishable narrative, this piece presents two actors with plum roles and an entertaining lightning comedy experience for the audience.

When it happens, it’s always an ambush. A monologue that shakes palpably with fury and love. Richard finds himself suddenly bereaved - his partner in everything except on paper snatched away. A chance for an older male actor to bring this on- the-pulse piece to life as death robs him of everything that they built together. Gradually the audience learns in a few brief expertly handled brushstrokes a family history from which his partner escaped but which Richard finds himself entangled in. A raw and powerful piece.

The portrait of a marriage and its disintegration through an airing of grievances between father and son. Using the psyche of a husband who abandoned his family, Busser skilfully merges past, present, future and a kind of no man’s land in a touching and credible duologue. With the hurt in different ways of father and son, the untangling of a mind maze through the dialogue’s clashes and regrets gradually changes the focus of the play until a final revelation and a resolution to take action before it is too late in a touching finale.

A precious and gently humorous little nugget of a play as a prodigal daughter returns home temporarily. A warm hearted mom and never-seen Dad welcome her back. But the play captures in its two scenes how the hitherto independent daughter must fit in again with the routine of her parents. This includes of course a cinema matinee trip with its seniors’ discount. We follow the daughter’s journey from exasperation and reluctance to acceptance as warm and comforting as sinking into a cinema seat with popcorn with her spirited mom watching by her side.

A clever and touching riff on the impact of romantic storytelling on two generations of women: a recently bereaved mother and her unmarried daughter. Skilfully threaded-through literary allusions and realities lift this duologue into a stunning reflection on the feminine psyche and a woman’s place in society in this wistful but down-to-earth duologue of a rarely charted type of mother-daughter relationship. A play with two intelligent and humane roles for older female actors and tiny, secret notes from the sorority to anyone who has felt both enhanced by and let down by literature.