Brighton Year-Round 2026

Short Stories Plays 2026

New Venture Theatre, Brighton

Venue: New Venture Theatre Studio

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

Katie Brownings, late artistic director of New Venture, has left several legacies. Perhaps her most innovative was to nurture directing talent by curating a series of short plays for each aspiring talent to direct, before allowing them to move on to full-scale plays. Short Plays 2026 is her final legacy, a production she managed before her tragic death in late August. Five plays by known and niche writers ensured an evening of two-and-a-half-hours flies by. Two actors are common to two productions: otherwise the 13 cast are unique to one of the five plays. The chairs and tables borrowed from local charities (see below) and costume handled by the cast are augmented by a fine lighting design by Bert Gladstone.

David Ives Sure Thing

Always open with an entrée. Think Constellations, except it dates from 1988. It’s set in a bar. Betty (Emma Howarth) is reading Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and is disturbed by Bill (Harvey Barton-Hague) asking if the chair is free. Each micro-scene might last for three seconds or a minute or so. Betty’s resistant, then in each iteration opens a tiny but more. Meanwhile Bill says appropriate or inappropriate things or Betty recoils and we reset. Gradually though we move along the narrative and the reset is just a few lines back. The eternal repeats and resets with variations is familiar to us from Constellations, but Ives got there 28 years before Nick Payne. Basically Bill’s as much alone as Betty, or at least that’s where we think they’re heading.

Ives touches the dialogue like a deft rudder, shifting and revising what’s said to remove initial awkward, even offensive comments and let them iron themselves out into two people ready for each other.  It’s deft, funny and Howarth and Barton-Hague relish the smart recoils and micro-shifts in each tiny scene: progressing to a rom-com finale. Oliver Canavan directs with lucidity and lets the grace and wit fall naturally. Delicious.

Alan Bennett Say Something Happened     

Jason Lever directs this poignant play with scrupulous attention to dynamics. He lets the pauses speak. It’s about two able-bodied pensioners invaded by a well-meaning very young woman from the council, trying to establish care needs long before they’re needed. Those were the days: this was written in 1982. Mam (Denise Evans joins Dad (John Hartnett) as they talk muted subtext and he tries plotting across  Finland to Helsinki on a large atlas.

They’re interrupted by a young woman: June (Zarrina Danaeva) from the social services, who’s recently transferred from Transport. Indeed she’s still somewhere in that mindset, eager but callow and treating people a little like traffic lanes. Hartnett with his bluff coping avuncularity is the perfect Leeds coper, the “mustn’t grumble” which more nearly hides his pain than Evans’ nuanced Mam. June is clearly out of her depth and Danaeva perfectly realises the sudden plight of a young woman confronted with human stories and sudden gulphs. The couple’s daughter is high-flying in London. There is though something more. Perhaps everyone learns something, but th aching nuance of this trio, especially the way Evans interacts with Hartnett and Danaeva is exquisite. It makes the coda a little heartrending. Exquisite.

Declan Feenan Catherine Medbh                

We return to another two-hander directed with heart and breath-taking pauses by Alice Healey. Jonathan Howlett’s Him is joined in a bar by Holly Morran’s Her. It swiftly transpires they’re ex-lovers. And in her guardedly warm exchanges she teases out more from him. Howlett etches a shadowy, self-doubting, youngish Irishman: emotionally adrift, sacked for persistent lateness. He’s lost. Howlett, always known for his gaunt, haunted characters, excels with vulnerability here.

Morran in a memorably contained but lyrical performance draws out her truth. She’s the smart teacher, someone he looked up to. So why did he leave? He asks a series of questions. Her litany of answers at the end are unexpected, and we find out why happened, and why. The coda though suddenly pulls a rug.

Brent Holland The Candidate   

This mostly four-hander thriller is flipped by the introduction of a fifth. Four people wake up with no memory of who they are, and wearing identifying colours Black (Dana Nastevica), White (Claire Coull), Red (Sapphire Samiullah), Blue (Jamal Riaz) find themselves in a locked room with mysteriously appearing objects: that is, after they’ve been knocked out and wake up with conditions changed. Compliance is enforced by aggressive buzzers and shocks to the head.  It soon becomes apparent that whatever entity is in charge is demanding the candidates eliminate each other. Blue and Black form a team, playing the games given them. White feels excluded. Is she ruthless? And what happened to Red?

Carolyn Chinn ensures this snappy, pacy thriller never hangs fire. It’s well-handled and though not character-driven, is sharply-etched by the actors. Samiullah’s aggressive Red, Nastevica’s friendly but ruthless Black, Riaz’s humane Blue, and Coull’s conflicted White who wakes up with blood on her white shirt, are all thoroughly convincing in this original thriller. Then there’s the omniscient Runnels (Suzanne Heritage). Thoroughly enjoyable.

James Fritz The Fall (exc)                        

Sarah Tansey has selected a superb work. Fritz wrote a three-part play exploring the narrowing options of young people and their responsibility to the old (and young) as they age into the future. It’s a remarkable play, premiered at Finborough in 2016 and revived (when I saw it) at Southwark in 2018: both by National Youth Theatre. In the first section presented here, a teen couple are looking for a place to have sex and she remembers her 92-year-old employer’s empty house.  The second sections deal with middle-age 30 years on when they’re 48, caring for an aged parent. And old age, in their 80s in a dystoptian care home where euthanasia is encouraged.  I wish we could see it entire, but understand the constraints of this format. Perhaps one day.

Danaeva’s Girl clearly feels responsibility beyond the exuberance of meeting her boyfriend and joshing him about stumbling and coming third in a sprint. She’s all for middle-distance, and  Danaeva’s flicks of realisation come with Girl’s quickening sense of what’s right and left-field, though with a twist at the end of this section. Luke Carruthers’ Boy is both larky and looser-limbed morally. Though his final shock at what Girl proposes seems almost to upend the balance between morally-driven Girl and  the more immature Boy Carruthers inhabits winningly. In fact Danaeva’s Girl asks serious questions that will recur in the next two acts. For now the couple cavort and lark and stumble over the discovery of Hartnett’s Mr Butler. Is he dead? What to do? Even in their relatively brief scene Carruthers and particularly Danaeva impress: Tansey knows how to surprise.

This is a superb showcase, with the emphasis on nuance in the first three, particularly second and third plays, that linger with the performances long afterwards. The second half with its vibrant witty thriller is then succeeded by what seems shaping into a haunting work: as indeed it will. An absorbing must-see.

Production Managers Ian Black, Katie Brownings

Stage Managers Gaby Bowring, Bryony Weaver

ASMs Ollie Wilson-King, Sofia Elliott, Chris De La Nougerede, Dora Slade

Set Team Leader Chris De La Nougerede

Lighting Design Bert Gladstone, Chris Phipps,

Lighting Assistants Enrico de Guiseppe, Dora Slade, Marcus Card

Lighting Operators Bert Gladstone, Ewan Cassidy

Sound Design Ian Black

Rigging Jim Prior, Liam O’Sullivan

Sound Operation Ian Black, Jim Prior, Chris Dent

Costume Design, Cast

Props Guy Dixon, Furniture Store, Emmaus Scrapspace

Poster and Programme Design Strat Mastoris, Tamsin Mastoris

Publicity Elysa Hyde

Photography Strat Mastoris

Health & Safety Ian Black.

Special thanks to Marcus Card for lighting equipment FOH and Box Office.

Published October 8, 2026October 9, 2026 by Simon Jenner