Danusia Samal – författare

Marking its 30th anniversary, National Theatre Connections 2025 draws together ten new plays for young people to perform, from some of the UK’s most exciting and popular playwrights.These are plays for a generation of theatre-makers who want to ask questions, challenge assertions and test boundaries, and for those who love to invent and imagine a world of possibilities.The plays offer young performers an engaging and diverse range of material to perform, read or study. Wrestling with themes like the cost-of-living crisis, activism, neurodiversity, the point and pointlessness of regret, human rights, and loneliness, this collection lays bare a rich and complex terrain in which students can fully immerse themselves, explore and discover. This 2025 anthology represents the full set of ten plays offered by the National Theatre 2025 Festival, as well as comprehensive workshop notes that give insights and inspiration for building characters, running rehearsals and staging a production. Like candles on a 30th birthday cake, this collection is bright, striking and set to make a lasting impression – the culmination of the celebrations it also strikes a note of eager anticipation as the next chapter begins

Cities are full of stories – it’s amazing what you hear if you stop and listen. Drawing on her decade of singing on the tube, Danusia Samal’s Busking It is a journey through the tunnels of the London Underground.This is a fun, moving and vibrant piece of gig-theatre, giving voice a multiplicity of passers-by: "We meet in detail half a dozen members of the public: her father figure, an old Boxer, a lonely man with two Iron Maiden tickets, a Spanish woman supposedly suffering from amnesia and a threatening man" (A Younger Theatre). Blending chance encounters with original live music, Busking It zooms in on the little interactions that show our humanity. It was developed as part of the RSC's Making Mischief festival, and won the HighTide Edinburgh award.

It's club night and the tracks are spinning. Set against a backdrop of precarious lives in urban London, two headliners crossfade between stories of love, sex, and losing their creative spark.Bangers follows the highs and lows of two strangers as they struggle with their own pasts, while hurtling towards each other's futures. All the while, the DJ continues to play, dropping samples and words of wisdom. In the end, it's not the last track that counts, but the one coming up next...Featuring original music inspired by early noughties and present-day R&B and Garage, Danusia Samal's exhilarating play was first co-produced by Cardboard Citizens and Soho Theatre, and directed by the former's Artistic Director Chris Sonnex. It toured community venues across London, before a run at Soho Theatre, London, in 2022.