Holly Arsenault has won the 17th Papatango New Writing Prize with Chamber, a play about teenage musicians shut inside a soundproof rehearsal room, which Papatango and Park Theatre will stage together in the autumn of 2027.
A record field of 1,913 scripts has produced its winner. At a ceremony held at Park Theatre on the afternoon of 20 October, Holly Arsenault was named the 17th recipient of the Papatango New Writing Prize for Chamber. The award brings her an £8,000 commission, a co-production by Papatango and Park Theatre on the Park200 stage, and publication of the script by Nick Hern Books.
The play is set in the soundproofed practice room of the Easton High School Chamber Orchestra, three weeks before ChamberFest, where a rehearsal is snagging on a badly held fermata when something happens beyond the walls. It may be an emergency; it may only be a drill. With no way of knowing, the young players are left to wait, and to fill the silence with theories about what is going on outside, in the quick, unsettlingly casual humour of a generation that came of age online and alongside extremism. The play's own line puts the dilemma plainly: "Look, it's probably Story A. But we can't rule out the possibility that it's Story B…"
Born in Montreal and brought up in several parts of North America, Arsenault now lives in Edinburgh. Much of her working life has been spent among teenagers, most notably as Executive Director of TeenTix, an organisation built around young arts audiences, and her plays have been developed at Seattle Repertory Theatre, ACT Theatre, Seattle Children's Theatre and Annex Theatre, as well as with _andfriends in Glasgow and Script Club Cardiff. A drama graduate of the University of Washington, she expects to complete an MFA in Playwriting and Screenwriting at the University of St Andrews in November.
Papatango's Co-CEO George Turvey described the winning play as "hilarious yet chilling" and said: "This will put another remarkable new talent on the kind of major platform needed for careers not merely to start but to be sustained." He placed the expanded prize against a difficult backdrop for new work: "We're proud the Prize is doing more than ever to support new playwrights at this critical moment, with the number of new plays produced dropping by 30% since 2019 (according to British Theatre Consortium)."
For the first time, the prize does not stop at a single winner. A new strand, the Papatango Prize Discovery, has gone to Naomi Soneye-Thomas for One More Tune, which unfolds over the final party at a celebrated club before it is demolished to make room for a luxury hotel, as its owner Derek, his daughter Chantelle, a singer on the rise, and the regulars watch old secrets surface. Soneye-Thomas also receives an £8,000 commission, together with further development from Papatango and the intention of a production in due course. An East London writer and filmmaker, she won the Grey Moth Originals Competition with her short film Oya, Dance!, wrote an episode of Casualty in 2022, and saw her play Flux run at Theatre503 in 2021.
The other three shortlisted writers move into a second new strand, Papatango Playwrights' Progress, which pays each of them £1,500 and gives them a year of workshops, mentoring and dramaturgy led by Turvey and his fellow Co-CEO Chris Foxon. They are Simon Jaggers, whose Avalon Land follows the bored teenage staff of a shabby Arthurian theme park beside Britain's deepest lake; Íde Simpson, whose We're Still Here brings a woman back after decades away to clear her late mother's house in the Bluestack Mountains; and Jesse Weaver, whose Satellite moves between 1978 and 2019 across three generations of women. Each of the remaining 1,908 entrants has been offered personal feedback on their script.
For Park Theatre the pairing has already paid off once. The previous Papatango winner, Hannah Doran's The Meat Kings! (Inc.) Of Brooklyn Heights, was co-produced there and went on to take the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize 2026. The theatre's Artistic Director, Jez Bond, said: "Chosen from almost two thousand submissions, and developed with Papatango's expert dramaturgical support, Chamber is a relevant and powerful new play about young people navigating today's burning world."
The production fills the closing slot of Park Theatre's 2027 season, which was announced before the winning play had been chosen. Chamber runs at Park Theatre in Finsbury Park from Thursday 28 October to Saturday 27 November 2027, with press night on Monday 1 November. Evening performances begin at 7pm, matinees at 3pm, and tickets start at £15.
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