From “shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” to “one touch of nature made the whole world kin”, some of the most famous lines in William Shakespeare’s works are about the relationship between humans and the environment.
It is this connection with the bard’s work that has inspired Shakespeare’s Globe to launch its first climate playwriting prize for 2026, which it says will harness the skills of storytellers and artists to “inspire societal shifts towards a restorative relationship with nature”.
Noting that almost every play Shakespeare wrote was about humans and our place in the natural world, Michelle Terry, the artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, said: “He helped build a theatre made of 1,000 oak trees, open to the sun, the wind, and the rain, bobbing alongside the ebb and flow of the River Thames. He brought thousands of strangers together in this elemental imaginarium and he put his craft to work.
“Now is the time to remind ourselves of our human nature and remember the profound and positive contribution we can make on planet Earth. There is no better way to do that than through the stories we tell. And there is no greater art form than theatre to unite people and tell those stories together.”
The winning playwright will receive £15,000 and support to develop their play, including rehearsal drafts with specialists at Shakespeare’s Globe and partner organisations Climate Spring and Fern Culture, and industry exposure to leading theatre decision makers.
To enter, writers must submit un-produced full-length stage plays in the English language that address the climate and nature crisis. The themes are interpreted broadly, and include environmental changes as well as the social, political, and cultural response. Submissions will open in June and close on 1 September, with winners announced in the autumn.
The prize is also partnering with theatres across the country, including Chichester festival theatre, Exeter Northcott theatre, Leeds Playhouse, Lyric theatre Belfast, Mercury theatre Colchester, New Earth theatre, Pentabus theatre, and Tiata Tahodzi, to host climate storytelling workshops.
Guy Jones, new work associate at Shakespeare’s Globe, said he hoped the prize would “attract plays from a huge diversity of writers, from those steeped in climate lore, to others who hadn’t seen themselves as a climate playwright until now”.
Amber Massie-Blomfield, the director of Fern Culture, which supports theatre-makers to produce works about the climate, said the prize was designed to “flood our theatres with exhilarating, inspiring, and surprising plays about the climate”.
“We exist in a time of profound significance for all human history, as we transform the ways we live to ensure a flourishing future for life on our planet. We cannot do it without the storytellers. Story, after all, is how we have always gathered, the way we process human experience, make sense of the events of our times, connect with our environment and start to imagine possibilities for the future,” she said.
Josh Cockcroft, the director of impact and research at Climate Spring, which works with TV and film to produce climate breakdown-related stories, said: “Theatre transforms us, it moves us beyond ourselves to create, for a moment, a community experiencing something wholly unique and metamorphic; moments of collective effervescence that we need now, more than ever, to bring us together. In this moment of rupture, culture has a vital role to play.”
