Braids and Cheer Up Slug

Shortlisted for the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain’s ＂Best Play for Young Audiences＂ Award (2022)

＂Don’t you ever get sick of it?＂
＂Being the only one?＂
＂Yeah. Being the Ambassador of Blackness?＂

Abeni is new to college. She’s putting purple braids in Jasmine’s hair and giving her ’the talk’, opening Jasmine’s mind to new ways of seeing the world - and the world seeing both of them. A new play by Olivia Hannah, about fitting in and standing out. Featured as part of BBC Arts Light Up Festival and played on BBC Radio, Braids was longlisted for the Alfred Fagon Award 2018 and shortlisted for the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain 2022 award for Best Play for Young Audiences.

＂Not that I’m saying I know more about you than you do, I’m not saying, that’s not what I’m saying, like, at all! Just that I do know you better than maybe you know yourself.＂

Will and Bean have been friends forever. ?But they’re not kids anymore and the adult world is a scary place. In a tent in County Durham, a Duke of Edinburgh Award trip becomes more complicated than either of them planned. Cheer Up Slug is a new play by Tamsin Daisy Rees, about boundaries and behaviour.

This double-edition of debut plays by North-East based writers was published to coincide with the premiere at Live Theatre in October 2021.

Olivia Hannah is a Newcastle-based scriptwriter. She wrote her first full-length play, ’Braids’, as a member of the Royal Court Writers’ Group (North) in 2018. ’Braids’ went on to be long-listed for the 2018 Alfred Fagon Award and selected by Live Theatre in Newcastle, where Olivia is also an Associate Artist. ’Braids’ was then scheduled for performance in April 2020, cancelled due to Covid-19. It was subsequently selected for BBC Radio 4’s Lights Up! festival in March 2021. In 2019, her short play ’Michelle’ was developed and performed as part of Workie Ticket Theatre Company’s ’Women Warriors project’, working with female veterans to share their experiences. She is a recipient of a 2019 Slate R&D commission from Eclipse, to develop an interactive theatre piece around Northern Soul and Black diaspora music in Newcastle in the 1960s and 1970s. In 2019, Olivia received an Early Development award from the BFI to write a treatment for a ’Braids’ screenplay and is currently working with producers to develop the feature. Most recently, Olivia took part in the 2020 BBC Northern Voices scheme, as part of which she wrote a TV pilot for ’Influence’, an anthology series about the impact of social media on offline life. And in August 2020, her second play ’Shit Life Crisis’ was long-listed for the Paines Plough Women’s Prize for Playwriting.

Tamsin Rees is a playwright, artist and life model from County Durham now working and living in Newcastle Upon Tyne.
She is a member of the Orange Tree Writer’s Collective 2021, an Associate Artist at Live Theatre and was a member of the first Royal Court Writers Group North. She likes telling stories that are rooted in the North East and prod at class, sexuality and power. Tamsin is currently an AHRC funded PhD candidate at Newcastle University where she is specialising in playwriting and researching how female sexuality operates in contemporary narratives through silences and subtext.