Overall winner of The 2015 Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting was Katherine Soper with WISH LIST.
Tamsin packs boxes in a warehouse, on the clock, to a target, with a zero-hour contract. Her brother Dean is housebound. Working to obsessive-compulsive rituals of his own.
When Dean is declared fit for work, their benefits are cut. There are phone calls to make, appeals to lodge and endless forms to fill in. Tamsin must pack faster, work harder, and fight to get the support she and her brother so desperately need.
WISH LIST is a sensitive and delicately powerful play about trying to survive when every system is against you.
WISH LIST was Katherine Soper’s first play.
At the time of winning the prize, she was working in a perfumery on Regent Street. She wrote WISH LIST as her dissertation play at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She took part in the Royal Court’s writers’ group in Autumn 2014, and developed a short play, Sundries, with the Young Friends of the Almeida in 2015.
WISH LIST premiered at the Royal Exchange Theatre in September 2016, co-produced with the Royal Court – where it made its London debut in January 2017. Directed by Matthew Xia, the production received critical acclaim and sold out in both Manchester and London. Read more here.