Recommended by Emmet L.F. Cameron

This play takes the horror truism that the unseen is scarier than the monster you show the audience & twists it in a way that’s almost cute — which is, of course, even scarier.

This short script is contributing to such big cultural work, uncovering, uplifting & humanizing the stories of the many LGBTQ+ people who resisted the Nazis & were so often both murdered by the enemy & erased by their supposed allies after the war. This script could be a valuable educational resource for young people both for its historic content & the powerful questions it asks about the choices people make when they have had every good choice taken away.

A well-constructed short that reminds the audience there is more context to every stranger whose behaviour may confuse or irritate you, whether you’re lucky enough to have their story rolled out for you in such a dramatically satisfactory way.

What if Dory Previn’s song “Esther’s 1st Communion” was a two-hander short play with 13-year-olds played by adults, & it got gayer by the minute? We don’t have to wonder, because Aly Kantor wrote it.

The production of this play on Gather by the Ghost Light is fantastic, & it's even more interesting knowing the seed of this piece is a true story from Mabey's own family. It takes a keen writer's mind to take a strange & silent moment from decades past & draw out themes of adult discomfort around race, gender & parenthood that still resonate today. [spoiler ahead] I love the little echo of Waiting for Godot in the ending that resolves with potential for connection & collaborative evolution.

This piece really makes the most of its 10 minutes to dig into the complexity of holding all the aspects of somebody close to you who has died, when those who were a little further from the centre might be able to hold a rosier vision of them.

There are so many turns within these 15 minutes, & each one is executed so softly, from waking the dead to solving a crime. The contemporary style of the dialogue & delivery on the Gather by the Ghost Light podcast makes the story feel nearer to the audience, which is intriguing when working with a subject like postmortem photography, which a modern audience might prefer to view as bizarre Victorian behaviour, rather than something relatable to their own experiences of family.

This play is brilliant. It takes a skilled hand to guide an audience through such a wild imagined landscape, keep them laughing, & make them face centuries of violence & injustice all at the same time. Lisa Langford does all of the above & more here, deftly intertwining ideas of slavery-robotics-genetics-ancestry through the lives of characters that, while touched with the fantastic, feel absolutely real within the world of the play, & relatable to the world outside of it.

This is a concise poem of a play about a person living in a world that has made their life increasingly impossible.

A great innovative use of the zoom format to tell a fantastical & funny story that stays tethered to the real human consequences of angelic neglect.