Recommended by Alice Josephs

A Halloween horror, where no one is innocent, with a twist in the tale. This two hander is a gift for actors, director & lighting designer alike. It has simplicity of staging but ratchets up the tension as it starts to dawn on the audience what is happening and why. Deliciously fiendish!

As gas and electricity prices soar, this short, passionate play about Generation Z Jessica struggling to keep a roof over her head, pay bills, get a job and understand her place in the world takes the temperature of our times. Cooper’s bold writing and staging uses rather than is used by Brechtian methodology. A director and designer with a troupe of actors could mine into the layers of this on-the-pulse fable with ‘grandmother’ more representative of a wolfish governmental ‘nudge’ unit replacement in propaganda mode than a loving relative and whose pronouncements are belied by a shivering reality.

A timely piece as women’s football is starting to seen as viable for broadcast. A young man’s assumption of territorial dominance and superior sporting skills is proven wrong when his sister shows him up and changes attitudes with her talent. A pithy piece which ratchets up the suspense and gives plenty of directorial, choreography, stage and lighting design opportunity to make this a visual
as well as a story and dialogue treat!

The spaghetti is probably in the (unheard but definitely a character to be reckoned with) Mama’s pot in this inventively comic radio play. Levine takes traditional Western tropes into pastures new with the narrator telling the tale of the old West and despairing of the cowboys’ ineptitude - so much so he starts harranguing them, breaking the fourth wall. With an energetic audio soundscape, this piece gives lots of leeway for an ingenious sound engineer and for a director and actors with spot on comic timing.

A double edged tale as we come to
realise the circumstances surrounding the creation of an almost-Pinocchio-like teddy bear as he passes through different landscapes and countries during World War Two. This would make a delightful and thought-provoking animation from the teddy bear’s viewpoint with the upbeat ending after horrific events lending itself to family viewing.

In a world of increasing tensions, this echo of a celebrated First World War incident can equally apply to the current day and the Cold War past. Three spies, each with distinctive national characteristics, have spirit-of-season moment of rapprochement in a literally disarming piece.

This quick fire witty comedy has both plenty of leeway for actors to strut their stuff down the aisle and a unique selling point - audience participation cleverly inserted to keep the story going and the laughter increasing. Easy to stage, this is a versatile theatre ‘event’ which could work in a variety of venues.

A seaside piece for two female actors which has potential as a sensuous and heart rending short film. With two points of view as the women confront the landscape, this gives plenty of scope for a director and actors to experiment visually and verbally and take the audience under the skin of the two characters.

An office comedy drama cleverly transplanted into the future on a starship. Two humans (male and female) and a vocal computer have the future of the human race in their hands (and microchip). But then the human pair realise they share a past and, with the wounds still raw, will the past for the two jeopardise the future of man and womankind? This is a short play, the compact story of which, with all its twists and turns, could well be expanded with the computer caught between warring factions before reconciliation and resolution.

A touching three-hander, with two female and one male roles, set in 1942 as a young German woman tries to insure her Jewish friend’s safety, hiding her in a sunless cellar. A precisely drawn piece with a visceral spin on a famous fairy tale, this is a piece about the survival of, while appealing to, the heart and the brain in an impossible situation.