Our fantastic Pitch Your Play 2023 winners will be sharing their staged rehearsed readings as part of a festival of new writing on Friday 25 August at The Other Palace theatre. Join us for a day of new writing, and support your fellow Masterclass community on their writing journeys. MEMBERS GO FREE - Check your dashboards for this deal! No a member? See all 3 plays for just £6 via The Other Palace website.

The Cleaner by Kate Reid, 11am Set in the USA in an apocalyptic future not too distant from our own, Violet and Richard are strangers who meet at the worst moment of their lives. She is an anonymous cleaner and he is the most powerful man in the world.

And they have one hour inside a locked room to make a decision that will affect the course of history. But as they start to learn more about each other, they realise that neither one of them is in control of the situation – and that they’re being watched by the people who are.

Corpselight by Daniel Grimston, 12.30pm “They’d be in the places they loved when they were alive – in the trees, the hollows, the hedgerows… Always in the form of a candle, and in the flame a face, and if you got close enough you could hear them whispering.”

Grief weaves its way through the beams of an old farmhouse, rising up from the soil and submerging a family in its blue light. It is one year since Paul’s death, and Tom is searching for him in the strange flames appearing around their fields. Tom’s wife Kay struggles alone to keep the place alive, as their daughter Viv returns from the city with her new partner into a life she’s no longer sure how to belong to.

Corpselight is a study in the movements of grief, a love letter to the complexity of queer relationships, and a portrait of how rural lives and livelihoods in England are changing irreversibly.

Sentence. by Gabrielle Nellis-Pain, 2.15pm

Sentence. follows the unlikely friendship between Andre, a middle-aged man who has been on death row in California for most of his life, and Amy, an almost thirty-year-old widow who is living back at her mum’s house in London.

Inspired by real letters exchanged with death row inmates over the past decade, Sentence. explores two opposing worlds that collide, and the common ground that is found in love, loneliness and life in the face of death.

The Other Palace website The Other Palace website