The core group is designed to give writers close support whilst they embark on the challenge of writing a full-length play for the stage. At the end of the course, their play may have a rehearsed reading or could even be staged by Soho Theatre.

This year's core group members are:

Gabriel Bisset-Smith

2002 - Play For The Day/ The Things Of Life (Radio) - Resonance FM
2005 - In Our Blood (Theatre) - Guildhall School Of Music And Drama
2007 - Here But There (Theatre) - Theatre Museum Covent Garden
2007 - Playtime (Theatre, Co written with Gary Oliver) - Hampstead
Theatre
2008 - Fight! Fight! Fight! (Theatre) - Hampstead Theatre
2008 – Graceland (Theatre) – Old Vic, 24 hour plays.

Gabriel was picked with seven other writers to go away with BBC3 to work on new television ideas and pitch them to the head of BBC3 (Danny Cohen). He currently has a comedy pilot in development. He also just finished an attachment with the Royal Court Theatre where he was working on a new play. He’s also a member of the BBC Sparks scheme.

Gemma Twells

I studied a Masters in Dramaturgy at Central School of Speech and Drama with a view to working in Writing and Directing for Theatre. Productions that I had worked on before the Masters had involved me working in both fields. I very quickly realised that I was really a Writer.
Following the course, a Director that I worked with sent a play that I wrote to Soho, which led to Suzanne inviting me to do the ten-week course. I found it helpful, focussed and it really made me consider how to get the best out of myself. It helped me in its most simple form to write often and be inspired to do so. The ten-week course finished with a reading of a short play of mine that I developed throughout the workshops. It was the most honest piece of writing I had written up until then. Since the course I have written a lot more.
I’ve been involved with an ongoing project with Suzanne Gorman over the last year and am currently working on a play for ten year olds. I write a lot of short stories as well as writing for the Theatre.
The play I hope to write for the Core group will be my fourth full-length play. It’s going to look at weather and blame and cause and effect and seventeen year olds. I’m looking forward to writing something big and bold and taking the next step in my writing career.

Natalie Mitchell

I started writing two years ago and was fortunate to have my first play, Can’t Stand Me Now, performed as part of the Royal Court Young Writer’s Festival in 2007. I was then one of six young writers chosen to represent the UK at the World Interplay Writer’s Festival in Australia where I began to develop my second play, White Riot. Following this I was invited to a BBC3/Writer’s Room residency to develop and pitch an idea for a returning series. I’m looking forward to working with the Soho Theatre to continue developing my writing as I’ve got so much to learn!

Seiriol Davies

Seiriol works in physical theatre, cabaret and comedy, and also music. He comes from Wales. He trained as a visual artist, then as a Lecoq physical theatre practitioner, and now he lives in Spitalfields and works with a number of companies.

He is drawn to magic and pleasure; power and how we deal with not having much; mythology and the epic in the everyday.

He will be devising a play exploring the social lives of pensioners, which is way too much fun to be work.

Jonathan Wright

I was born and brought up in Halifax in west Yorkshire.  My dad is African-American and my mum is mixed race having had a Jamaican father and English mother.  Both my parents were working class but then went on to university and got professional jobs which I guess kind of makes me reluctantly middle class.  I did a BA in History and Politics and the University of Liverpool and spent the 2nd year of my course at the University of Maryland in America.  I specialised in black mainly African-American and African studies.  I then went on to do an MA in Acting at ArtsEd. where I began to write.  I am a professional actor now but have written a one act play called White Rose which has been given a Seed Commission by The Talawa and I am currently developing it.  I have written another one act play called The 25 which got to the Fourth Round of Soho Theatre's Verity Bargate Award and I have also written a short play called Finding Fatima which came second in The Soho’s Westminster Prize and was recently produced and performed for one night at The Soho Theatre.

Cash Teran

I am very excited about being invited to join this years core group. I am developing a play entitled ‘The Model Man’ set in the gutters of Soho, a place I know too well, it’s spirit bursting like an incurable virus charging through my soul.
It is set in a walk up on Bateman Street where a group of socially unacceptable vagrants, misfits, whores and their keepers fight against the insipid lives of property developers and local counsellors.
Underneath the gutter bravado is ultimately a story about the loss of moral fibre and identity. It aims to dissect of common need for conformity and comfort, the desperation that hooks our hearts as we age and retire into jobs we hate and relationships we resent.
Other plays include; Beware of the Dogs, The Last Peepshow in Soho, Hawkers Hookers and Albanians, Close Your Eyes and Floor It.
I am also a member of the writers group at Clean Break Theatre Company and have a sitcom in development with Tiger Aspect.