Developing the next generation of playwrights from underrepresented backgrounds.
PlayingON Words is PlayingON's playwriting development programme for emerging writers from underrepresented backgrounds, particularly those with lived experience of the criminal justice system, care system, mental ill health, poverty or housing precarity. We identify writers through our long-term engagement projects, at the point where that relationship can open a route into structured dramaturgical support, a route the industry's traditional pathways don't reliably offer people with these backgrounds.
Through workshops, writing exercises and one-to-one dramaturgical support from acclaimed playwright Lin Coghlan, participants develop original plays rooted in their lived experience, with the potential to progress towards professional production.
Why did we create PlayingON Words?
Exceptional writers exist in every community, but the industry's usual pathways carry costs that quietly filter people out: the fees for drama school or writing courses, the unpaid internships and placements that assume you can work for free, the literary agents and script departments that are easiest to reach if you already know someone in them. None of that is about talent. It's about who can afford the time, the money and the connections it takes to be seen.
PlayingON Words exists to open a further route in, one grounded in relationships we've already built through our engagement work. Writers who join often bring other theatre experience alongside it; what PlayingON Words adds is sustained, expert support at a stage when that support is hard to come by. Writers are paid to take part, so the programme doesn't ask anyone to absorb the cost that usually comes with this kind of development.
PlayingON Words is designed to:
Pay writers for their time and remove the cost barrier that usually stands between them and expert dramaturgical support
Open a route into professional theatre grounded in engagement work, alongside whatever other theatre experience a writer brings
Treat lived experience as the artistic expertise it is, not a story to be shaped by others, but the writer's own
Build a pipeline where the people writing our productions are drawn from the communities we work alongside
More than a writer development programme, PlayingON Words is the first stage of PlayingON's commissioning model. It's how the people whose lives and communities inform our work also get to be the ones telling the stories.
Our Creative Pipeline
Engagement Programmes
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PlayingON Words
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Seed Commission
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Research & Development
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Full Commission
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Professional Production
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National Tour
PlayingON Words sits at the heart of our artistic commissioning model. From our 2024 pilot cohort, two projects progressed to seed commission stage: Gloria by Jill Power and Supernova by Alfie O'Sullivan-Neill. Supernova has since progressed to a full commission and is in development for a planned professional production. Writers who come through PlayingON Words go on to work across the sector, Alfie's own path has also included the Royal Court, Hampstead Theatre, the Lyric Hammersmith and the Bush's youth theatre, and this is what the pipeline is for: a genuine, professionally commissioned route to the stage that starts with the relationships we've built in the communities we work alongside.