Radius Playwriting Competition 2024

We are delighted to announce that the winner of the Radius Playwriting Competition 2024 is the play Holly and Lichen by Kit Walkham. Kit will receive £750.

Congratulations to the authors of the other shortlisted plays:
A Prayer for Great Aunt Ada by Richard Adams
Unbelievable by Jonathan Skinner.

More about the winning play:

Holly and Lichen by Kit Walkham

When Dorothy arrives in The Hollies care home her new companions mirror the characters of her schoolfriends Phyllis and Hilda seventy years earlier. Dorothy has been a distinguished scientist, studying and recording natural phenomena from her earliest years, and now with encroaching dementia she is searching for lost diaries that will provide vital evidence for modern environmentalists. The scene alternates between the years before World War II and 2009/10, and a cast of six women play parallel roles in both time periods. The glamorous schoolgirl Phyllis becomes a much-married matriarch reliving her past through fragments of song, while Hilda reminisces about her exciting life as a celebrity war correspondent and her female lovers. Following Dorothy’s death, the two help her daughter Jane to find the lost diaries in a hidden compartment of her workbox. The judges said, “a very fine piece of writing with challenges but also rewards for any group that stages it”.

Arcadia – Tom Stoppard, 1937