Meet the Emerging Writers Table

The year is 43 B.C. Julius Caesar has just been shanked. His murderers have gone on the run with what’s left of the treasury, leaving behind a power vacuum of epic proportions.

Although MAECENAS, a 23-year-old aspiring alcoholic, is glad to side with his childhood friend and Caesar’s adopted son OCTAVIAN in the imminent civil war, he’s not too stoked about Octavian’s domestic policy, which seems to be “kill everyone who disagrees”. When Maecenas is tasked with tracking down his brother-in-law (and boyhood fling), his loyalty to Octavian comes increasingly under suspect. There are only two ways out of this: either Maecenas convinces his headstrong sister to divorce the husband they occasionally share (unlikely) or he convinces Octavian to hold off on the state sanctioned hit lists (equally unlikely). As Octavian circles ever closer towards absolute power, Maecenas is torn between family and politics, love and survival.

PUBLIC GOODS is a tragicomedy about living at the tail end of a historic slide towards fascism — and what happens when we don’t discuss politics at the dinner table. 

How can you remove the aspects of society you despise, without losing your values in the process? How can you fight for restorative justice, while hating those who have done you harm? Centered on the 2022 Tauranga Rainbow Youth arson attack, Burn It Away explores the strained relationship between queer New Zealanders and the world around them. We follow fictionalised versions of the social workers struggling to support their community after losing their home, and the arsonists who burned it down, moving through the justice system. Vignettes explore other key moments in Aotearoa's queer history, as well as figures like the activists fighting for our rights, and the leaders who keep peddling hatred and misinformation. Queer people are surrounded by a society which can both hate and love them. Burn It Away is an exploration of what that means, and if there's any way through.

Early 1900's, Te-Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington. A young Katherine Mansfield struggles to confine her sexuality in a tightly laced society. Eventually banished from her upper-class family due to her indiscretions, she navigates the hedonistic underbelly of London’s queer literary scene. Finding love, loss and liberation - leading to her breakthrough success and untimely end.

Connor Amor-Bendall is writing a queer-period drama, currently titled Close Female Friends, exploring the relationship between her Great Great Aunt Edith Bendall and Katherine Mansfield. The play draws on Mansfield's diary entries and uses verbatim text to inform the deeply passionate and ultimately tragic relationship between the two women. It also holds a mirror to the challenges queer people faced in the early 1900s to today's society. 

A playful introspection on the contradictory experience of being a South Asian girl dating in modern Aotearoa.

Anjali has finally escapes her conservative, backwards mother and is starting a new chapter - attending university. Or rather dating, drinking and disappointing her ancestors. It's time to go crazy. Boy crazy? Girl crazy? Who knows? Not Anjali. But as her mother says, "keep it to yourself." With nothing to loose, Anjali is ready to be selfish, sexy and slutty.

But she reconsiders the fun in flirting when she has a threatening experience with a shy-guy. 

'The dating life of an Indian girlie' is a semi-biographical exploration inherited modesty, biracial relationship and self esteem. Let's disrupt the stigma of Asian dating and go wild.

This new work explores the parallel experiences of university first years and retirement village residents. Inspired by real statistics showing a surprising spike in STIs among people over 70 - particularly in retirement communities - the play examines two 'coming of age' experiences that appear to mirror each other across generations.
 
The piece looks at how both groups navigate new relationships, freedom, and identity, while maintaining appearances of respectability. Currently in development, this play explores desire - at any stage of life.

The Party is an adaptation of Andy Shauf's 2016 concept album of the same name. A one-act, single-location ensemble play that captures the fleeting beauty, awkward tension, and quiet heartbreak of a house party where everyone is quietly hoping for something, and nobody will quite get what they want.

As guests arrive early, late, or uninvited, layers of past and present relationships unravel. Secrets come out, romantic hopes are quietly crushed, and small tragedies change the course of their lives across the night, all set to live renditions of Andy Shauf's songs, woven into dialogue.

Each scene follows a different guest, interlinking the night's events puzzle piece by puzzle piece.