Masterclass Youth Board member is the 2025 Bill Cashmore Award Winner!

Hi! I’m Shona - I’m a regular attendee at Masterclass events, as well as a member of the Youth Board. It was announced last week that I’m one of two winners of this year’s Bill Cashmore Award!

What is the Bill Cashmore Award?

The Bill Cashmore Award is run in association with the Lyric Hammersmith in memory of actor, director, playwright and entrepreneur Bill Cashmore. It gives the opportunity for two writers aged 18-30 to have a one-act play produced at the Lyric Hammersmith (performed by the SPRINGBOARD trainees), as well as receive mentoring and support.

What’s the process been like?

The callout for scripts went live around October/November time last year - I remember looking at the deadline and thinking ‘I’ve got about 8 weeks to write something for this’, which felt like a decent amount of time. I had a think about the play I wanted to create then sat down for a first draft. Through schemes like Masterclass I’m very lucky to know a lot of very talented actors, so I enlisted some friends to do an online readthrough and used that to generate notes for my redraft. 

The turnaround for the longlist and shortlist was pretty rapid - by March I knew that I’d made it to the shortlist and was scheduling in a chatty interview for the final round of judging. I was pretty nervous but everyone on the call put me at ease - and then Sasha Bates (founder of the Bill Cashmore Award) rang me that same day to say I’d won! 

Since being on board the focus has mostly been rewrites, though we’ll be heading into rehearsals in August. It’s been such an incredible gift to have paid time to write, receive wisdom and advice from members of the Lyric team and incrementally improve my script knowing that I’ll get to see it up on its feet in September. 

For anyone considering submitting for the award next year: definitely, definitely do it! The experience has been so positive and everyone involved has been so generous. As an early-career writer, the gap between putting on rehearsed readings/scratch nights/informal runs and having a play produced at a well-known theatre felt like an unbridgeable chasm; this scheme has helped me traverse it.

What’s the show?

My play Friendsgiving is about a friendly annual tradition that takes a turn when it slowly becomes clear there’s an intervention at hand. It’s being staged alongside the other winner Chloe Yates’ wonderful play The Mending Circle. Both pieces will be performed 4-13 September, and tickets are available now!

You can find out more here!