Johnny Flynn and Robert Macfarlane are among the writers of the ten plays shortlisted for the first Climate Playwriting Prize, announced today by Shakespeare's Globe ahead of a winner's ceremony on Friday 27 November.
Ten new plays remain in contention for the inaugural Climate Playwriting Prize, a competition set up by Shakespeare's Globe with Climate Spring and Fern Culture to find, and then back, playwrights who take the climate crisis as their subject. The shortlist was narrowed from a longlist of 47, itself drawn from 614 applications, and the winner, to be named at a ceremony at the Globe on Friday 27 November, receives £15,000 together with dramaturgical support to develop the play.
The ten shortlisted plays are:
- Exposure by Aaron Sze
- Merrymeade by Coral Wylie
- The Play That Solves Everything by Grace Waga Glevey
- Llandonna Witches by John Dawson
- Gods and Monsters by Johnny Flynn and Robert Macfarlane
- Wilt by Kieran Knowles
- Pelt by Kitty Archer
- No Eels this Year by Sydney Trotter
- Tiny Alarms by Timothy X Atack
- Cambium Layer by Zoe Cooper
It is a field that runs from the established to the barely begun. Flynn, the actor, composer and songwriter, and Macfarlane, the nature writer behind Underland and The Old Ways, have worked together before, on a two-person story-song show seen at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and on tour. Zoe Cooper has an adaptation of Mrs Dalloway due at the Royal Shakespeare Company in spring 2027, and Timothy X Atack won the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting in 2017 with Heartworm.
At the other end of the list, Aaron Sze made his debut with Belly of the Beast at the Finborough Theatre in 2025, and Coral Wylie's first play, Lavender, Hyacinth, Violet, Yew., reached the Bush Theatre the same year. Sydney Trotter, a Belfast playwright, wrote for five years purely for his own pleasure before a Cardboard Citizens competition in 2025 brought him a first commission.
The judging panel is made up of Sir Lenny Henry, Lucy Kirkwood, Nancy Medina, Professor Pablo Mukherjee, Amir Nizar Zuabi, Lucy Stone and the Globe's artistic director, Michelle Terry. Eight partner organisations also fed into the judging: Chichester Festival Theatre, Exeter Northcott Theatre, Leeds Playhouse, Lyric Theatre Belfast, Mercury Theatre Colchester, New Earth Theatre, Pentabus Theatre and tiata fahodzi. Each hosted a climate storytelling workshop run by directors Guy Jones and Daniel Bailey with playwright Nina Segal, which is where several of the shortlisted writers first took up the brief.
Guy Jones, the Globe's New Work Associate, said: "In a year defined by extreme heatwaves, with the climate making itself known more acutely than ever in our day-to-day lives, addressing the crisis is clearly a priority for theatre artists. The plays have been a source of righteous rage and huge optimism; they are bold and they are entertaining."
He added: "Some of them are early in their playwriting careers, and others have been writing for decades. Their plays uncover stories from urban, suburban and rural communities in the UK."
Of the two organisations sharing the prize with the Globe, Fern Culture was founded in 2025 by Amber Massie-Blomfield to develop new theatre about the climate and nature crisis, while Climate Spring works on climate storytelling in film and television and already runs the Climate Fiction Prize for novels.
