Recommended by Alice Josephs

A fiercely ambitious man born into privilege. Equally ambitious, a woman viewing him as her way into fame and celebrity. Each appropriating a natural process, each with a hold on the other’s life and, most terrible of all, the life of a, as yet, unborn child. Set in a doctor’s consulting room, An Incubator is structured as a chilling duologue, with every alternative weighed for expediency rather than joyful event or heartbreaking decision. With two layered characters, this could stand alone or as a possible springboard for a longer play with its disturbing view of an engineered future.

The traditional family Christmas of over priced gifts and family squabbles as viewed by a grumpy millennial Christmas tree who has definitely got the needle. An entertainment with good characterful roles plus the opportunity for inventive costume design. This fresh take on the excesses of the holiday season would be a funny and thoughtful addition to any Christmas show of short plays, secular or faith based, with its original premise and great title!

Simple to stage or film, this piece is almost musical in the rhythmic, dare one say it?, bullet-like dialogue until it stops as suddenly as the heartbeat of a victim. Richter skewers with damning accuracy the deadly repetition of rolling news in the internet age where the terrifying and the blasé merge into one.

When artist and model clash creative tension takes on a whole new meaning in Carnes’s witty, bawdy yet heartfelt piece. This duologue cleverly takes one of the Renaissance’s best known paintings, turning its passive mythological female figure into a feisty woman in her prime fighting against the artist’s male gaze. With two characters, whose reputations precede them, struggling for control, these are glorious roles demanding passion, guile and precise comic timing and a director who can fully draw out Carnes’s dramatic embodiment of art history combined with the eternal political and sexual battle of the sexes.

A seemingly unequal friendship provides structure as two middle schoolers negotiate from different directions the vicissitudes of life. Griffin Speckman creates totally believable girls and a reversible power dynamic while painting the world around them with a light, deft touch: school popularity stakes, the influence of children’s supernatural books, TV series and movies, the church, mobile phones and finally, at the base of it all, families. Charming yet dark, this short captures a truth about childhood and susceptible young minds with dialogue laced with the girls’ unconscious humour and poignancy in strong roles for two young actors.

A couple live through their own ‘Meet Me At St Louis’ moment at New York’s 1964 World Fair. She is more open to a wonderful world of travel and science. He is happy in keeping a couple’s splendid isolation with the attitude toward spouse, sport and life outside the USA of a backward era’s old fashioned children’s books. Davis subtly shapes the ‘brave new world’ with touches of the ominous through this duologue set in a brightly painted ‘American century’, the 20th century. Playful yet deadly serious, this easy-to-stage piece nevertheless provides dramatic gut-wrenching double perspective complexity.

Set in the nexus where art, politics, money, patronage, jobs and media meet, this acerbic and poetic piece gives dramatic voice to an elusive experience. The wit of succinct and devastating dialogue, from the nervous unpaid intern to the wealthy patrons considering their next investment, at a new art exhibition gracefully serves up plum roles for a large cast. After characterfully covering a range of topics, everything binds together into a dynamic and dramatic reflection of what still gives art, an age old market, its value in a twenty first century world.

Left in limbo, a rock star’s wasted life is laid bare as he passes through heavenly bureaucracy - although can we be sure that the magnificently and punningly named ‘keepers of the records’ are celestial archivists or just an extension of the music business making commercial decisions? No Rest For A Soul offers actors two roles with distinctive voices, the business-like assessor and the middle aged ‘wild child’. This piece could equally work on stage and screen, with a recognisable ‘Heaven Can Wait’ type trope, which nevertheless brings to a familiar theme its own unique perspective.

In this touching Chaplinesque piece. Weaver’s almost-romance transforms itself almost imperceptibly into a metaphor for a writer’s life with visceral action from a diverse cast of characters which speaks volumes. With an understanding of stagecraft’s possibilities and giving infinite scope to actors, Weaver throws out the gauntlet to any director, designer, lighting and maybe sound technicians with the heart, soul and technical prowess to stage an inventive, original and powerful script.

Far from chain eateries like the Hard Rock Cafe, in small-town USA there’s the Gateway Cafe - also without the acute accent over the ‘e’ like the more famous brand. But locals here can make pit stops for the unique Gateway Cafe’s satisfying meatloaf, real deal home cooking rather than a rock group. Like the first episode of a comedy drama series set for a Cheers-like run we meet an array of characters, including a prodigal son, ready to turn tables on an intruder playing politics with their own allusive script worthy of a heart-warming updated Preston Sturges.