This is split between signature and delivery.

Our New Works Associate will dig into your ideas with you, and give tailored support as you begin developing the play.

Nathan Powell (Creative Director), Yusra Warsama (Associate Creative Director) and Ashlie Nelson (Head of Producing and Programming) will ground you in the Everyman’s producing model, helping to contextualise and guide the development of your ideas.

We’ll also offer notes on the work you submit, and discuss any future pathways for development.

We want you to get a feel for our stages and audiences, so we’ll invite you to Guest Night for each Everyman production and offer £5 tickets for all eligible Playhouse shows until Summer 2027.

If you need to spread out with multicoloured post-its and sprawling diagrams on big paper, the Writers’ Room is available as a bookable creative space.

Where appropriate, we’ll do our best to connect you and your script to directors and producers in our community.

If you want to use this as the basis for a funding application, or need a room to read it through with friends, we can support there too.

We won’t accept adaptations or translations, or reworkings of your own previous productions. We also aren’t currently looking to develop new musicals.

We’ll ask you to submit one as part of the application process.

We take ‘full-length’ to mean 60mins of stage time or more.

We’re prioritising those nearer the beginning of their career as playwrights, for whom a play on our main stage would constitute a clear step forward .

For us, a mid-scale venue is one with over 300 seats. You might have made work at studio-scale.

We take a professional production to be one in which the team making it is paid, and which has run at a theatre for more than 5 performances (at a single venue or as part of a tour).

Liverpool City Region includes addresses within Halton, Knowsley, Liverpool, Sefton, St Helens and Wirral.

How does our social, political and economic landscape live within the narrative, placing characters’ values, desires and circumstances in dynamic tension to demand high-stakes choices? 

We want to explore big topics, themes and concepts whilst keeping our focus on the people and what matters to them? 

We want to ask questions we may not know the answer to (and that it might not be possible to answer) with nuance and rigour.

We’re excited by characters and ideas that are simultaneously good and bad – by work that leans into crunch and contradiction, grey areas and ambivalence, and that resists easy answers.

How can the play surprise, thrill and entertain through its form and theatricality, bringing the audience together in a shared, distinctly live experience.

How can we take the weight of our subjects and themes seriously, whilst still searching for lightness?

We want to draw on the characters, communities and stories close to us, and use them as a springboard into conversations of national and global significance.

Whether or not the play is set here, we want it to feel distinctly from here.

How does strongly does the proposal meet our artistic ambitions and production parameters?

Can we see this proposal becoming an incisive, nuanced, thrilling, surprising, humane and entertaining piece of theatre?

Does it demonstrate the level of craft needed to deliver on the promise of your proposed idea?

We’ll read up to 20 pages at the longlisting stage, and the full play when making our final selections.

Are the three ideas distinct from one another in their subjects, themes and forms? Are both programming slots represented? Is there diversity of lived and experience and professional experience in the group?

You must have written at least one full-length play – though you might have written many more plays that that! – and not have had your work professionally produced at the mid-scale.

Beyond that, it’s more about how clearly the application demonstrates an ability to deliver the proposed idea to a high standard than it is about your professional credits.

We take ‘full-length’ to mean 60mins of stage time or more.

We’d say that the mid-scale is any venue with over 300 seats. For context, the Everyman has around 400 seats.

For us, a professional production is one in which the team making it is paid, and which has run at a theatre for more than 5 performances (at a single venue or as part of a tour).

We’re prioritising work made to the production parameters of our summer new writing slot, which has previously included Attachment by Julia Cranney, The Walrus Has a Right to Adventure by Billie Collins and Tell Me How It Ends by Tasha Dowd.

You can submit any full-length play that you’ve previously written – it’s just to get an idea of your craft and voice, and help us imagine the play you’d begin to write with this Seed Commission.

We are not asking you to write anything new, or submit any script for the idea that you’re proposing for this Seed Commission.

Please submit scripts at their full length. We’ll read approx. 10-20 pages initially, and the full play when making our final selections.

Yes, but the seed commission will need to be split between you – and you should submit co-written work with the application.

We aren’t currently looking to commission new musicals – though plays with music are fine.

Yes, as long as you’re from here originally. As part of our support for the local creative ecology, we’re specifically looking to give Seed Commissions to writers with close links to Merseyside.

For Seed Commissions, the main thing is that you pitch us an idea for a new play, and submit one of your previous scripts just to give us an idea of your writing. We don’t give feedback on the script that gets submitted

For Open Script Submissions, we focus on the play you’ve already written. We offer written feedback, and send a comprehensive script report to those that make it to full-read stage.

In either case, if you send us a script that we love and want to work on with you, we’ll tell you!

Not all writers pitching an idea for a Seed Commission will want feedback on the script they submit as a supporting document – it may have been through several stages of development and/or been produced already.

Equally, not all writers sending a play through Open Script Submissions will be eligible for Seed Commissions, or have an idea to pitch for the summer new writing slot.

No – we’ll read one play per writer. If we get different submissions from the same writer, we’ll ask which of them they’d prefer us to read.