Heretic Voices (NHB Modern Plays)

This volume presents the best new writing in monologue form, celebrating unique voices with exceptional stories to tell. These three plays, finalists in the inaugural Heretic Voices competition, were first performed at the Arcola Theatre, London, in 2018. Set in Croydon, South London, Dean McBride by Sonya Hale is a vivid and poetic story of deprivation, loss and redemption through love, which tells the story of Dean, a young man hardened by suffering, who struggles in life before finding his way back to happiness. A university professor is caught in a storm when an image of her in a changing room is shared online. Exploring how images of women are represented in art and social media, Annie Fox's Woman Caught Unaware is a searing examination of the culture of body-shaming. Depicting a teenage girl's solo journey to the North Pole with her father's ashes, A Hundred Words for Snow by Tatty Hennessy is a complex, epic and undulating story that pitches themes of death and rebirth against a shifting backdrop of climate change, exploration and the uncertain geography of the North. This collection includes a foreword from actor and playwright Lolita Chakrabarti, one of the judges of the competition, which was organised by Heretic Productions.

Sonya Hale has had plays performed at The Southbank Centre, Latitude Festival, E15 University and in prisons and treatment centres. She has worked with Synergy Theatre Project, Clean Break Theatre Company and Outside Edge Theatre Company. She runs writers' workshops with Outside Edge and is currently under commission at Clean Break. Rehearsed readings of her first play Glory Whispers were performed at Theatre503 after winning Synergy Theatre Project's national prison scriptwriting competition. Dean McBride was inspired by her own experience of addiction and her struggles to be a mum to her thirteen-year-old son. They now live in South London and enjoy a close bond and a happy relationship.