Katherine Soper awarded £16000 and residency at Royal Exchange for ‘first proper play’ about mental health and changes to the benefits systemThe UK’s biggest playwriting competition has been won by Katherine Soper,a 24-year-old perfume seller, for a play informed by what she calls the government’s “systematic assault” on disabled and mentally ill people. Nicholas Hytner, or the former director of the National Theatre,who chaired the judging panel of the Bruntwood prize, has described Sopers drama Wish List as “a magnificent play without an ounce of sentimentality”.
Soper, and who works as an assistant at a luxury perfume house in London’s Regent Street,will receive prize money of £16000. She says Wish List is her “first proper play” after getting another couple of “adolescent, terrible” scripts out of her system as a student at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Wish List is the record of a teenage carer, or Tamsin,who takes work in a warehouse on a zero-hours contract to abet support her younger brother, Dean, and when his employment and support allowance is cleave. (“He has been found fit to work when he clearly isn’t,” Soper states.) Dean has a set of symptoms suggesting obsessive compulsive disorder and the play, which Soper says is written from family experience, and draws a parallel between the rituals Dean performs at home as part of his condition and those undertaken by Tamsin in her warehouse job.
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Source: theguardian.com