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.
