Two new plays complete the first year of the Ryan Calais Cameron Season at the Broadway Theatre in Catford: Cranes by Demi Wilson-Smith from 23 September, and How To Keep Warm in Winter by Kaleb D’Aguilar from 14 October.
The Ryan Calais Cameron Season at the Broadway Theatre in Catford continues this autumn with two new plays. Cranes, written and performed by Demi Wilson-Smith, runs from 23 September to 4 October 2026, with a press night on 24 September. How To Keep Warm in Winter, written and directed by Kaleb D’Aguilar, follows from 14-25 October, its press night on 15 October.
Both are studio productions of twelve performances each, and both are new work by writers who had not previously had a full staging. That is the point of the scheme rather than an accident of scale: the season is a funded pipeline for early-career Black and Global Majority writers from Lewisham, offering mentorship from Ryan Calais Cameron, dramaturgical support, development space and the money to get a script as far as a run. It also puts more than 23 local creatives into paid work.
The season opened in July with Justice Ezi’s Last Goal Wins, which sold out.
Cranes is set in 2010. Summer has just turned eighteen and wants to be a photographer, and she goes to her first protest — against the rise in student fees — expecting to help change the world. It does change everything, though not in the way she anticipated. Wilson-Smith drew on her own experience of being at a protest and, as the production puts it, in the wrong place at the wrong time; the play looks at identity, adulthood, the suppression of dissent and the criminal justice system. It was first shown at the Broadway Theatre’s SEEN Festival last year and has been developed since into a full production. Merle Wheldon directs, with movement direction by Theophilus O. Bailey.
How To Keep Warm in Winter moves to 1973, as Edward Heath’s Three-Day Week arrives and London faces a hard winter. Irene has just come from Jamaica to join her childhood sweetheart Everton in a single room in Peckham, and the fuel crisis and a new friendship with their landlord David begin to pull at the marriage. D’Aguilar’s first play was long-listed for the Alfred Fagon Award and this is its first staging. Further cast and creatives are to be announced.
“Times are changing, and we’re coming out of the Windrush Generation and entering the Rebel era of Caribbean young people unwilling to ‘just get on with it’,” D’Aguilar says of it.
Calais Cameron, who grew up in Lewisham with the Broadway Theatre nearby, hand-picked the plays. His own work includes For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy and Retrograde, with Afronauts opening at the Royal Court Theatre in November.
“Growing up in Lewisham, the Broadway Theatre was the place that sparked my creative imagination,” he said. “To establish this season is a dream come true, but more importantly, it’s a structural necessity. We are facing a massive crisis in the writing sector, and we risk losing an entire generation of vital Global Majority, working-class voices if we don’t build doors for them to walk through. The response to our first production proved exactly that; Justice’s play Last Goal Wins, provided incredible momentum and I cannot wait for audiences to see what Demi and Kaleb have created. These are phenomenal talents capturing deep resilience, and their stories deserve to be heard.”
The season is delivered by principal producer Carmel O’Connor and producer Nina Cavaliero, with funding from Arts Council England and Lewisham Council.
Both plays run at the Broadway Theatre in Catford, with performances at 2.30pm and 7.30pm. Tickets are £15, or £12 concession.
