Soho Presents Clean Break Womens’ Play Series

Woman’s theatre company Clean Break will premiere six new plays by female playwrights, with a series of pieces about women, crime and justice at the Soho Theatre this November. EV Crowe, Sam Holcroft, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Chloe Moss, Winsome Pinnock and Rebecca Prichard are all contributing new pieces to the season.

Charged will present the six works in performances of two cycles with three plays each, running from 12 to 27 November 2010 (previews from 10 November). The project will take over the entire building, taking audiences on a journey between Soho Theatre’s different spaces.

Girl gangs, older women trapped in the system and deaths in custody are some of the themes explored by the series, which promises to be a set of “engaging, provocative, moving and funny plays”. The production is accompanied by a series of events including panel discussions and student performances.

EV Crowe‘s previous play, A Just Act was produced by Clean Break in 2009. Her play, Kin will open in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court in November. Sam Holcroft’s Cockroach, co-produced by the Traverse Theatre and the National Theatre of Scotland, was nominated for Best New Play by the Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland in 2008. She received the Tom Erhardt Award for up and coming writers in 2009, and was the Pearson Writer in Residence at the Traverse Theatre, for the 2009/10 season.

Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s plays include The Night Season at the National Theatre, Cottesloe in 2004 where it won the Critics’ Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright. Chloe Moss’s credits include This Wide Night for Clean Break at Soho Theatre in 2008 and How Love is Spelt which opened at the Bush Theatre prior to a US première at the New York Summer Play Festival in 2005. She has been a writer in residence at the Bush Theatre and with Paines Plough.

Rebecca Prichard’s Yard Gal won the Critics’ Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright and was co-produced by Clean Break and was performed at the Royal Court and in women’s prisons. She is currently AHRC Fellow at Lancaster University, where she is researching ways to use creativity to support female survivors of violence. Winsome Pinnock’s plays include Mules at the Royal Court Upstairs and Can You Keep a Secret at the National Theatre.

Clean Break is a women’s theatre company which works with women whose lives have been affected by the criminal justice system. The company delivers productions, new writing projects and drama-based education from its North London studios and in women’s prisons. They were nominated for the 2009 South Bank Show Award and presented Lucy Kirkwood‘s it felt empty when the heart went at first but it is alright now at the Arcola Theatre and the revival of Chloë Moss’s This Wide Night at Soho Theatre in 2009.

Charged will feature direction by Clare Lizzimore, whose recent credits include Faces in the Crowd and Mark Ravenhill’s War and Peace, Fear and Misery at the Royal Court; Lucy Morrison and Caroline Steinbeis.