Radius Playwriting Competition 2020 in association with the Finborough Theatre has been won by Darren Donohue for his play Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks. He wins £500, dramaturgy with the Finborough Theatre and a streamed online reading of the winning play (replacing the staged reading, due to the Coronavirus pandemic). Details of the online performance will be announced shortly.
Winner Darren Donohue is from Co. Kilkenny in Ireland. His plays and readings for the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, include Home Game, The Death of Actaeon, Home-from-Home. Other plays include Dayshift (Tramedautore Theatre Festival, Milan, and Festival on the Crisis PIIGS, Barcelona), Voices in the Rubble (Rapid Lemon Productions, Baltimore, USA), Tuesday Evening (following the news) (Fishamble), A Bucket Full of Fire (Sheer Tantrum and Pandora), The Bird Trap (Three Streets Theatre Company), Keep the Home Fires Burning (Comedians Theatre Company, Edinburgh Festival) Revelations, Propelled Upright (Dublin Fringe Festival), Bedlam (Dublin Theatre Festival), and Dual Cats with One Crayfish (Irish Rep, New York City). Darren is married to Margaret and they have one daughter, Emily.
Radius Playwriting Competition 2020 was judged by Neil McPherson and Sue Healy, Artistic Director and Literary Manager of London’s Finborough Theatre. Judge Neil McPherson, Artistic Director of the Finborough Theatre, said: “The competition this year was very close, but we are happy to announce Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks as a clear and worthy winner. The competition is judged entirely blind, and we very much look forward to working with Darren on the staged reading which, due to Coronavirus, will now be presented online.”
The final shortlist for the competition was A Prayer for the Dying by Robert Pegg, Arthur and Charlotte by Jane Sunderland, East and Twenty-Third by Les Ellison, Entropy by Kate Reid, Misfits by Jonathan Skinner, Naked is the Realm by Rebekah King and You in Your Small Corner by Steve Dimmer.
The first RADIUS Playwriting Competition in 2018 was won by first time playwright Hannah Morley for her first play Petrichor. Hannah subsequently went on to win a Channel 4 Playwrights Bursary with the Finborough Theatre. Her new play Rough Music received a staged reading as part of the Finborough Theatre’s Vibrant 2019 – A Festival of Finborough Playwrights. She is currently part of the BBC London Voices group and is developing work for both stage and screen.
The next biennial Radius Playwriting Competition will take place in 2022 and will be announced in Autumn 2021.
Radius provides high-quality drama scripts to churches and community groups. In addition to a collection of original takes on the Christmas and Easter stories, they specialize in plays that ask searching questions about how life should be lived, avoiding offering easy answers. More information about Radius’s playwriting competition, YouTube Channel, their unique script collection and other initiatives can be found here.
Visit the Finborough Theatre by clicking here.
