Teacher Ian makes a play for £10,000 writing prize
A TEACHER from Ormskirk has been shortlisted for the £10,000 Liverpool Hope Playwriting Prize.
Ian Nightingale’s play, Paulo & Me, is one of six plays shortlisted for the award.
As well as the prize money, the winner’s play will be considered for production by Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre.
The award is run in partnership with Liverpool Hope University, and Liverpool’s Royal Court theatre, and aims to find the next great comedy play.
Paulo & Me centres around Mandy, a long-suffering mum who is at her wits’ end with her marriage to her slob husband Colin.
Colin’s only passion in life is his local football club.
Mandy then encounters a dashing Italian stranger, Paulo, who happens to be the club’s new manager.
As a result, Colin has an epiphany about his own life.
Alongside teaching geography, Ian has been writing for radio and screen for the last five years.
He is a member of the BBC Northern Writers group, and his writing to date has received a BAFTA Rocliffe commendation for an unproduced screenplay, been shortlisted for both The Red Planet Prize and the Alfred Bradley Bursary, and shortlisted by Philip Shelley at Channel 4 for development.
Ian was also selected by the Head of Development at LIME pictures to complete trial scripts at Hollyoaks.
His first short film script ‘The Librarian’ won the 2016 Special Merit Award at the Northern Film School at Beckett University and is currently being filmed. Ian said: “I’ve always been fascinated with the immediacy of theatre since being taken as a schoolchild to watch Willy Russell’s Our Day Out.
“As I got older, I found my writing was deeply affected by those initial theatre experiences, and this shaped the way I wrote about real people in communities and the struggles they faced.”
The winner of the competition will be announced at the Royal Court theatre on March 27th.