Carmen Marcus is one of 18 recipients of the New play Commission Scheme

We are pleased to announce that Carmen Marcus, author of HOW SAINTS DIE (Harvill Secker, 2017), is one of the 18 recipients of the New Play Commission Scheme (NPCS), announced on 17 August 2022.

The NPCS was designed in response to the decline in new theatre commissions resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic, and ensures 18 new commissions for playwrights, in partnership with a venue or producer, across England in 2022.

The architect of the scheme is playwright and former WGGB President David Edgar, while the selection panel was chaired by WGGB Chair Lisa Holdsworth and consisted of writers Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, Tom Wentworth and Roy Williams, writer/director Aisha Khan, writer/actor Amelia Bullmore, producer/director James Dacre and producer Kate Pakenham.

The grant will go towards Carmen Marcus’s play, ‘And The Earth Opened Up Under Her’, a lyrical working-class reimagining of the classical Persephone and Demeter myth.

Brigid runs away from Ireland with her two teenage daughters, Sky and Lark, to a ramshackle seaside town in the North of England in search of peace. But the world is full of roads leading to hell and Sky and Lark manage to find themselves lost in the dangerous underworlds that open up for teenage girls. Sky pursues a man who cruelly plays with her, and Lark starves herself to stay a child. It is up to Brigid to find her daughters and drag them back out of hell, on her Raleigh shopper bike with the help of Bede, the Irish Wolfhound.

See the full announcement here.