A reworking of Sophocles’s tragedy Philoctetes by the performance poet, writer and musician Kae Tempest is one of 10 plays in the running for this year’s Susan Smith Blackburn prize for female, transgender and non-binary dramatists.
Tempest – an award-winning poet and two-time nominee for the Mercury music prize – was shortlisted for the play Paradise, which was performed at the National Theatre in London last year. It is joined on the shortlist by two plays produced on smaller stages in the capital. Benedict Lombe’s memoir-monologue Lava, which spans from Mobutu’s Congo via post-apartheid South Africa to modern-day London, was presented at the Bush theatre. Amanda Wilkin’s Shedding a Skin, which will soon return to Soho theatre where it ran last summer, was described as a “wondrous weepie” by Guardian critic Arifa Akbar in her review.
Two Irish playwrights have been shortlisted for the prize. Sonya Kelly’s The Last Return depicts prospective audience members waiting for their chance to see a play. With cruel irony, Kelly’s play itself – which was developed by Druid Theatre – is still awaiting the chance to welcome in theatregoers. A full production has been postponed a number of times due to Covid restrictions. Sarah Hanly’s Purple Snowflakes and Titty Wanks, about a convent schoolgirl in Wicklow who dreams of studying musical theatre, ran at the Abbey theatre in Dublin and opens in February at the Royal Court in London. The Guardian’s Helen Meany called it “a bold mix of the sacred and profane”.
Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith is shortlisted for her play Berlin, a two-hander set in a Berlin loft, and there are four American finalists. Chiara Atik’s Poor Clare is based on the stories of Saint Clare and Saint Francis of Assisi, while in Daniella De Jesús’s Get Your Pink Hands Off Me Sucka and Give Me Back, a modern Dominican-American student encounters Isabella I and King Ferdinand II of Aragon. The characters in Zora Howard’s play Bust mysteriously begin to disappear and Lauren Whitehead explores the US war on drugs in a play strikingly titled The Play Which Raises the Question of What Happened in/to Low Income Black Communities Between 1974 and 2004 and Hints at Why Mass Incarceration Is Perhaps a Man-Made Disease and Highlights the Government’s General Lack of Empathy for Poor People of Color and Dispels the Notion That Our Condition Is Our Fault and Helps Make Visible Why We Riot When We Mourn and Also Tells the Story of Anita Freeman & Her Kids.
Leslie Swackhamer, executive director of the prize, said it had been a phenomenal year for new voices in playwriting: “Two of our finalists are debut plays, and nine are first-time finalists for this prize. All of the plays are highly theatrical and probe the burning issues of our times.”
More than 160 plays were nominated for this year’s award, which recognises “works of outstanding quality for the English-speaking theatre”. Judges for the 2022 prize are Bridgerton star Adjoa Andoh, playwright Luis Alfaro, lighting designer Paule Constable, director Whitney White, actor Saidah Arrika Ekulona and Justin Audibert, artistic director of the Unicorn theatre in London.
The winner will receive a cash prize of $25,000 and a signed print by the artist Willem de Kooning. Last year the prize was won by Erika Dickerson-Despenza for cullud wattah, a play about the Flint water crisis, seen through the eyes of an all-female Michigan family.
