Sian Owen

National Theatre Connections 2024 draws together ten new plays for young people to perform, from some of the UK's most exciting and popular playwrights. These are plays for a generation of theatre-makers who want to ask questions, challenge assertions and test the boundaries, and for those who love to invent and imagine a world of possibilities. The plays offer young performers an engaging and diverse range of material to perform, read or study. Touching on themes like trans-rights, the mental health crisis, colonial history, disability activism, and climate change, the collection provides topical, pressing subject matter for students to explore in their performance. This 2024 anthology represents the full set of ten plays offered by the National Theatre 2024 Festival (eight brand-new plays, and two returning favourites), as well as comprehensive workshop notes that give insights and inspiration for building characters, running rehearsals and staging a production.

A warm, funny picture book about fitting in, from an exciting debut author and illustrator team!

Katie has gone from a little girl who used to climb trees, ride bikes and go on adventures to an adult who worries about everything. But now Katie is a mum, she must be brave in a whole new way. Determined that her young daughter will never lose the powerful, fierce magic she arrived into the world with, Katie sets off on a mission with the help of a stolen BMX, a policewoman with bad hair and a pigeon in a bag as she rides around Newport to find what she's really made of. By listening to the unheard voices of the city, she begins to discover what the women who have gone before can teach her about how to be brave. Sian Owen's one-woman play is about what we are made of, what we leave behind, and learning to be brave when your world is falling apart.

And strange smells would arrive on the wind. So it seemed that there was some kind of magic in this field. Some said that there was a dragon underneath that had been woken by the lightning. Some said there was treasure down there too. Fracking. How far down do you own the land beneath your feet? How much does where you live inform the person you become? What happens when someone else comes along and stakes their claim? For young couple Bea and Joseph this is a story of fracture: of fractured hearts, lives and lands. This Land digs down through the history – and the future – of a patch of earth and everything that has and will happen there. This programme text edition was published to coincide with the play’s premiere by Pentabus Theatre Company, Shropshire, in March 2016.