Vickie Donoghue – 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

Mudlarks is a tragic, beautifully realised play about three young men trapped at the wrong end of the river. On the muddy banks of the Thames, downstream from the bright lights of London, three boys hide from the police after a night of recklessness. Over the course of the freezing night their fears, secrets and dreams emerge, collide and combust revealing the desperate frustration of lives barely led but already ravaged. As morning dawns, their options diminish and just two questions remain: do they have the power to determine their own fates, or are they destined to sink into the mud?Mudlarks heralds the arrival of an urgent new voice in British theatre. Essex-born Vickie Donoghue'spowerful debut exposes the culture she grew up with and sees on a daily basis. With brutal honesty she explores teenagers' impulse to dream, and its futility in a reality that has no space for dreamers.