Featured Playwright
Nell Weston
About Me: I am a queer-feminist playwright and artist from Birmingham creating work that is introspective, textural, haunting and playful, and provides voice to the under-represented. I enjoy working with ensembles and using a combination of expressive physicality and punchy, witty dialogue to walk the line between the ethereal and the tragic, the silent and the screaming. I graduated from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in July last year, where I studied writing for radio, screen and theatre. I am currently working on ‘Sappho Could’ve Bathed Here’ in Bristol with her theatre company Muddled Muse, a play and community project generating a sapphic eco-system to fight loneliness and the under-representation of queer women and non-binary characters through Sappho’s poetry, magical-realism and quick-witted comedy, and am also now looking forward to extending my practice to screenwriting, adapting the same project for a TV sitcom and also adapting a short play “No Scrumping” into a feminist folk-horror film short.
Featured Play
Empty in Angel
Empty in Angel tells the story of a bicycle courier and her community's astounding fight for workers’ rights in the gig economy – their simple demands for fairness, dignity and security which will end in a historic legal battle. Based on actual events, Empty in Angel lifts the lid on the gig economy and tells it like it is. Empty in Angel is a powerful piece of political theatre about something happening right now, the burgeoning movement to fight back against the gig economy ethos. The play was written with the full knowledge, approval and cooperation of the Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB), the trade union that supported the cycle courier through the court case which forms the foundation for this play. Empty in Angel was highly acclaimed during both of its runs in 2019 and 2021, which included performances at the Bloomsbury Theatre, Old Red Lion, Etcetera Theatre and the White Bear Theatre. It was a finalist in two Standing Ovation awards and was nominated for an Offie for best performer.
Playwright: James Woolf