London Playwrights: Coming up in 2021!

Happy New Year everyone and hope you all had a great festive break! Whilst going into Lockdown (for our UK followers at least) hasn’t been quite the best way to kick off 2021, we’re still feeling optimistic about developing our work throughout the year and most of all, supporting new and emerging writers the best we can! After spending most of 2020 reacting and adapting to our strange new world, we definitely learned a lot and feel and we’re in a good place now to grow and offer you more opportunities than ever – and that’s something to be excited about!

So, what are we up to? As you know, at the end of last year we joined the Lion & Unicorn Theatre as an associated company – this is  big news for us as it means we have a home from which to expand our work.  Current restrictions mean we haven’t been able to get through the doors yet and start building on the partnership, however, we’ve been busy brainstorming new ideas to bring writers together, develop new plays, and build on our community of playwrights. Watch this space for updates as soon as we know more!

As usual January is a busy month for us with WrAP, our January playwriting challenge – we’ve got almost 200 of you taking part this time round and writing plays with us, if that’s you – then we hope it’s going well! If you haven’t signed up this time, you’re still welcome to join and we can send you the writing prompts so far so you can catch up, or visit it all at a later date. Also, we know it’s a really weird time for writing  – and uncertainty can really zap your creative energy so don’t be too hard on yourself if your enthusiasm for WrAP wanes, remember – anything you have at the end of January, whether it’s a few pages or just the seeds of an idea, is more than you had at the start!

In the Spring, we’ll be opening up our member submissions again where members will be welcome to send us your WrAP plays (or any play you have written). We’re currently working on a new submissions process for our members which we will use to identify writers and plays we feel we can develop further, as well as offering feedback to all those who submit. We really enjoyed reading the plays you submitted last year, we have now provided feedback to all the writers and we can’t wait to see what exciting new writing this year brings!

High on our priority list for the new year is redeveloping the members’ website. We’ve had feedback that it’s not always easy to find the resources and want you to know that we’re listening! We’ll be shaking things up to make your experience better and we’ll also be adding plenty of new resources – from professional advice to new online courses and lectures, we’ve got lots of cool new stuff in the pipeline.

We’ll also be continuing with our online Zoom workshops and if you haven’t booked a place on any of them yet, check out the latest programme here. Don’t forget, members pay at least 20% less for workshops and for our script consulting services. We’ve loved meeting lots of you through our online workshops over the last few months and being able to develop more accessible, convenient, and cheaper workshops was definitely one of the highlights of last year for us.

And lastly, we’ll be continuing with the ever successful Play Club, our online book club where writers are invited to submit a short play in response to the chosen text. If you want to find out more about this, you can watch last year’s Play Club performances on YouTube now. 

So, even in though some of our plans are still up in the air for now and we can’t wait to get together with as many of you as possible in person as soon as we can – we’ve still got plenty of work to be getting on with in our quest to level the playing field for writers and to help you to develop your work. As always, none of this would be possible without the support of our members! As a small non-profit organisation, we completely rely on our supporters to keep us going, so it’s true when we say we couldn’t do any of this without you – thank you! And if you like what we do, enjoy the weekly round-up of opportunities, and want access to even more resources please consider supporting us if you can. Membership costs just £3.63 per month and every single member makes a massive difference to us and our work!

We wish you all the best for 2021 and here’s hoping things get easier in the coming weeks!

Happy Playwriting,

Kimberley & The LPW Team