It is the day after Sarah Grochala heard her name called as the winner of this year’s Women’s prize for playwriting, and we’re back at the London Library, where the ceremony took place. She still can’t believe it: “It was a complete shock, my poor dad was getting ready to commiserate me.” But her play, Intelligence, which begins with the Victorian computing pioneer Ada Lovelace in the 1840s and then moves through a series of unexpected reincarnations, is a truly original, illuminating epic – and as one of the prize judges, I’d know.
The idea for the prize originated with producer Ellie Keel in 2019. After noticing the low number of plays by women being produced on national stages, Keel came across some research that revealed the extent of the problem: in 2018, only 26% of new main-stage plays in the UK had been written by women. With this information, she approached Katie Posner and Charlotte Bennett of Paines Plough and pitched them the idea of a prize for female playwrights. Now in its third year, it comes with a £12,000 prize fund. The five plays shortlisted this year grappled with the climate crisis, the home office, culture wars and AI.
