Stromness Drama Club and Rachael McGill present
Stromness Plays
A festival of new theatre writing inspired by the topics of the Stromness Debating Society (1953-2012)
Supported by a Scottish Society of Playwrights SSP@50 Fellowship funded by Creative Scotland
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Short documentary video of the project produced by Mike Partridge, Stromness Drama Club:
Click to download the final showcase programme
and the project report​​
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​The competition was open to all with an Orkney connection
The brief was to write a 5-25 minute play - any style, theme, or setting - using one of the selected Stromness Debating Society topics as the title or a line of the dialogue. List of debates here. Competition rules here.
​The winners:
First Prize (£400): 'Plan B' by Aine King
Second Prize (£300): 'Two Pitchforks West of Stromness' by David McNeish
Third Prize (£200): 'Gambling is a Major Evil in this Country' by Fiona MacInnes
Highly Commended: 'Stromness Wants Nothing' by Roger Simian, 'Your Parents Muck You Up' by Amelia Porter, 'The Visitor Experience' by Aine King.
All to be performed in staged readings on 1 November, at Stromness Town Hall, along with the 'Official Selection' of five more plays:
'Female Corpse' by Eilidh McKenzie, 'Home Cooking' by Eilidh Fisher, 'The State of the Stromness Street' by Morag MacInnes, 'What Do We Do Now?' by Barbara Stevenson.
Congratulations to all and thank you to everyone who entered!.
First prize winner Aine King receives her award from Graham Garson of Stromness Drama Club
Some of the entrants at the Stromness Plays launch
The Judges
Graham Garson is the convenor of Stromness Drama Club and has been directing shows for them for three decades, including many prize winners.
Gerda Stevenson is an award-winning writer, actor (trained at RADA), director, singer-songwriter, working in theatre, television, radio, film, and opera, throughout Britain and abroad. She is the founder of Stellar Quines, Scotland’s leading women’s theatre company. Her poetry, drama and prose have been widely published, staged, and broadcast. For the 2021 St Magnus Festival she directed a film adaptation of George Mackay Brown’s ‘The Storm Watchers’, called ‘astonishingly powerful’ by Joyce MacMillan.
Pam Beasant has lived in Orkney for four decades and is well-known on our literary scene, as the first George Mackay Brown Writing Fellow and the author of seven plays performed in Orkney, including A Hamnavoe Man, commissioned by the St Magnus International Festival and performed in Stromness in 2021, and Beneath the Flow, performed as part of the Scapa100 commemorations in 2019. She directed the Orkney Writers’ Course for the St Magnus International Festival (with co-tutor Jen Hadfield) from 2011 until 2017.