Recommended by Alice Josephs

In this ‘Educating Danny’, academia is like a taxi ride. You hitch a lift with your supervisor as they rise up in the hierarchy, but you have to pay. This taut two-hander carefully dissects the psychology of student and mentor, the copy cat behaviour both in career and practices. But it’s also about two humans, each in their own way vulnerable, with plenty of layers for actors, director and audience to discover. A self contained short, also potentially part of a longer piece, hits all the right analytical and emotional buttons in its 10-minute span.

Hey, this may be a new genre - the Revenge Comedy (rather than tragedy) as this is inspired by a true event and how it should have ended! A solidly-structured piece (although overladen with directions) and good dialogue with twists and turns galore. With three guilty-looking suspects and a student turned detective, this is a play with a range of tones for actors. Given to an experienced director, with perhaps a bit of thinning down, it has the capacity to stimulate lots of laughs and ratchet up the tension. A recognisable situation and a perfect playwriting revenge!

A piece of pottery proves to be a remembrance of things past and a tangible link with a landscape and life on planet earth, far, far away. In just a minute, the playwright lays out a complete plot and story, a past, a present and, wonderfully catching the audience’s imagination, possibilities for the future. With strong, impactful roles for two women, this also has potential for audio, conjuring pictures in the mind, especially if part of a collection of micro plays.

A tiny play which punches way above its weight with a conservationist, anti poaching update. A triumph of precise storytelling with a wistfully funny twist, this is a thoughtful audience pleaser for all ages, rewarding directors and actors injecting pace and sharp comic timing.

The axe for arts’ funding is falling for real
in life off stage. So, it’s not too big a step to this vision of utilitarian hard times with the closing down of theatres in favour of apartments and supermarkets. The playwright skilfully evokes a world in flux over several scenes with six distinctive characters, including roles for older actors, all orbiting round the theatre matriarch who has presided over generations of talent. A poignant and all-too-plausible scenario and warning for the future where economic zealotry becomes the new Puritanism.

A trip down stand-up memory lane at a turning point of two comedy styles and two people’s lives. A woman comedian out of the 1980s’ alternative comedy scene on the verge of her big break. A Borscht Belt stand up, swallowed up and spat out by TV, ambushing her, reciting old school routines. Yet like shaggy dog stories and punchlines, the senior with failing health and the female comedian cannot do without each other. Two tremendous roles for actors with the showbiz generation gap mirroring social change and personal insecurities and relationships in a quick-fire, thought-provoking piece.

As a subject, mass shootings and subsequent debates about gun control for sad reasons remain topical. Here a spoken, searing oratorio juxtaposes public service and commerce, economic incentives and bitter ‘trickle-down’ disparities set against the legal sale of guns. School teacher and company executive, in their separate spaces of public education and private business, open up irresolvable questions, alongside an impoverished couple. The classical form gives operatic weight, but also space for director and actors to bring to the fore the illogic, anguish and smallness of individuals as they battle for sanity faced with circumstance and avoidable events.

A glimpse of a family’s struggle, normally kept behind closed doors, as a daughter and therapist push the family patriarch towards a kind of recovery after a stroke. The trio of memorable personalities make for a perceptive piece filled with humour and determination when, in the effort to regain what has been lost, even failure becomes a sort of victory. With three strong roles and the characters exploring a gamut of emotions as well as physical need, this is a play of quietly extraordinary power and sensitivity.

Is it really a rational decision or economics or is it the rule of the few with the power to judge another? Or a mixture? The playwright skilfully unravels the sorry story of comatose drug addict, talented Zach, those who care and those who don’t care for him and the decision to give or withdraw treatment. This humane play examines the processes of modern medicine, through the characters of staff, patient, relative, lover and seamlessly drip feeds in its plot a recognition of life and death decisions left in the hands of those who know us least.

An entitled political candidate prepares to bend a college sorority sister to her will, as she had years before, in this understated but devastating piece. Two older female actors have fulsome, power-reversal roles, in a tawdry tale of corruption and hubris during a seemingly civilised, carefully-orchestrated encounter over tea and cake. Judiciously structured with compelling characters, and echoes of the elite college entrance bribery scandal, the trajectory is simple but never simplistic. Especially when the playwright shows how easily downfall could be avoided if money, power and adversarial politics had not tainted the lawmaker’s every move.