Award-winning theatre company Squint today announces the recipient of The Squint Playwriting Award. In 2023, through their six-month Educational Programme, Squint developed nine East London artists from low-income backgrounds. The programme included workshops, masterclasses, and Q&As, with each of the participants assigned a mentor relevant to their background and emerging practice. Following a Showcase of all nine playwrights’ work at Theatre Royal Stratford East in November, Squint today announce Beattie Green as the recipient of The Squint Playwriting Award; a £6110 commission to write a one-act play for Squint.
Andrew Whyment, Artistic Director of Squint, said: “We’re so proud to announce Beattie as The Squint Playwriting Award’s inaugural recipient. Beattie’s writing has wit, inventiveness and honesty that is inherently theatrical; they are exactly the kind of artist we hoped to discover and develop through our programme and it’s a privilege to be working together with Beattie towards a full-length play.”
Beattie Green said: “Through Squint’s programme I’ve felt a shift in my sense of self as a writer, away from trying to please others and towards writing about what I truly find interesting, unignorable, and messy. The experience has given me confidence to call myself a playwright and offer my ideas up with glee and pride, rather than embarrassment. The opportunity to continue working with the people that made this shift possible is such an honour and I’m so excited. I feel listened to for what makes me the writer I am without feeling pigeon-holed, tokenised, or misunderstood; a rare and wonderful thing.”
At the Showcase last year, Beattie shared an extract of their play, Kill My Darling; Andie and Zoe on the road to parenthood, but an act of betrayal frays the fabric of their romance, disrupting the very structure of their story. Time is queer and adults act like babies in a play that asks, how are babies really made?
Squint is an award-winning East London theatre company that stages stories about the here and now. They collide new writing, choreography and genre in unexpected ways to create thrilling nights at the theatre. Squint was founded at the University of Reading in 2009 by Artistic Director, Andrew Whyment. We have been working with writers and producing new work since 2010. Today we are London-based but work internationally. Previous productions include Long Story Short (Charing Cross Theatre) and Molly (Charlie Hartill Award, The Stage Award). Our programme of Online Workshops equips participants with creative tools that can be applied to their own writing and devising projects. They are wholly inclusive and focused on creating space for people of all ages and experience who are looking to develop new ideas or nurture existing projects. In 2020-21, we delivered 25 workshops and engaged over 300 participants from around the world; they include actors who have never written before, writers who need a jumpstart and directors who are devising for the first time. Our education work is led by Andrew Whyment, Lee Anderson, Adam Foster, Louise Roberts, Claire Gilbert, Kane Husbands and Ash J Woodward. Between us we’ve designed and facilitated education and participation projects for organisations including the National Theatre, Synergy Theatre Project, Good Chance Theatre, The Old Vic, the National Youth Theatre, Guildhall School Of Music & Drama, Royal Welsh College Of Music & Drama and Hackney Empire.
