Through October and November 2012, 4 playwrights travelled 2747 miles across the UK, spending 53 hours on the road, in the air, or on a train… delivering 23 workshops in 12 cities to over 400 writers.

In many of the workshops, we asked the participants “what could or should playwrights be writing about?” This contentious question opened up a lot of debate and vibrant discussion which was great! So we wrote up what people had been saying in the workshops (check out our lovely word cloud) and thought we would raise the question through our website – so please leave a comment below if you want to answer that question or have a thought to add to this list – it would be great to hear your comments.

Here’s what the writers who joined us on the some of the Bruntwood Prize Roadshow had to say…

How do we reimagine the world?
Whose story is it anyway? Why do you want to tell it?
What makes a play resonate for an audience? Makes them what to talk about it afterwards?
Who says ‘should?’ How do we make sense of the world in our own way?
Or how do we escape it? Open up a world we’ve never been to?
The only certainty we have is to be open. And to be openly uncertain about the outcome…
The ever growing gap between the rich and the poor opens up the door to real exploitation & hatred. Is that where writers come in? Because it’s a gap in imagination too…
Let’s find the extraordinary in the ordinary…
Let’s examine what it means to be human in the world today…

The Bruntwood Prize is an open invite to show us the world inside your head. We’re looking forward to reading every script that gets submitted – the countdown begins on January 31st! Get tickets for the launch event here and tweet us your questions along the lines of what makes a great play to @bruntwoodprize now!