Sapling, which won the 2025 Women’s Prize for Playwriting, gets its world premiere at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond from 5 June 2027.
Sapling opens at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond on 5 June 2027 and runs to 3 July, before the already-announced Sheffield Theatres dates from 7-24 July. Georgina Duncan’s play won the 2025 Women’s Prize for Playwriting, and this is its first staging.
Claire O’Reilly directs. The play is set in Northern Ireland in 1990 and follows Gerry, a teenager filling his days with car parks and graffiti, ten years after his brother was murdered. The killer is released under a new identity, the memorial garden is destroyed and a stranger arrives in town. Duncan writes it as a coming-of-age story rather than a thriller, warm and often funny.
It is a four-way co-production between Paines Plough, the Orange Tree Theatre, Sheffield Theatres and the Women’s Prize for Playwriting. It is the fourth winning play Paines Plough has produced since co-founding the prize with Ellie Keel in 2019, after Reasons You Should(n’t) Love Me, You Bury Me and Consumed. The Orange Tree’s earlier collaboration with the prize, The Swell, won an Evening Standard Award and was nominated for an Olivier.
Katie Posner and Charlotte Bennett, joint artistic directors of Paines Plough, called it “a deeply moving, gut-punch of a play about growing up in an atmosphere of silence, division and grief”.
Duncan’s earlier work includes Penalty for Improper Use, commissioned for LAMDA’s MishMash Festival in 2024 and later given a rehearsed reading at Theatre503, and her one-woman show ASBO BOZO at Riverside Studios. O’Reilly’s directing credits include Emma at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Marie Antoinette at Theatre Royal Bath and Wonder Boy at Bristol Old Vic.
Paines Plough also confirmed the first names for its day of events at Shedinburgh, held at the Young Vic on Friday 9 October 2026. Posner and Bennett chair a ShedX panel at 5pm with writers Abi Morgan and Dennis Kelly on shaping a play and its team, followed at 6.40pm by Come to Where I Am, which commissions playwrights to write monologues about home and belonging. Sophia Griffin, whose debut After Sunday won an Off West End award, has written a new piece for it, with more names to follow.
The company has named Manjinder Virk its Fellowship Playwright for 2026. The attachment comes with a bursary and a place on the core team; Virk was a finalist for this year’s Women’s Prize for Playwriting with The Room, written during her time at the Royal Court.
Paines Plough’s current production, Morna Young’s After Party, plays its final performances at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry from 9-11 September 2026, after premiering at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe as part of the Traverse Festival.
Sapling runs at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond from Saturday 5 June to Saturday 3 July 2027, then at Sheffield Theatres from Wednesday 7 to Saturday 24 July 2027.
