WOMEN looking to take back control of their lives are at the centre of two plays that emerged victorious in a competition in partnership with The National.

Alongside Edinburgh Little Theatre (ELT), our contest looked to give the spotlight to some of Scotland’s finest theatre talent.

The playwrights were asked to write a one-act play lasting 50-55 minutes, which the ELT team are helping to put on in a prime-time slot at the Fringe next week.

As well as having their scripts performed, Emma Findlay and Georgia Nelson, the two winners, will receive a cash prize of £1000.

ELT director Derek Douglas was among the panel of experts judging the entries. He said: “There was a really diverse bunch of submissions, and I think we had more than

120 plays handed into us. They ranged from quite simple scripts to very complicated ones, with casts from one person to 15.

“It’s been brilliant working with everyone – they’ve put so much effort and work into it. With Emma being the writer and the performer, it makes it a really interesting dynamic that she brings to it. And it’s been fascinating working with Georgia. Her play really gets you thinking about relationships, and who actually has control in them.”

Findlay trained and graduated at Acting Coach Scotland in 2016, and her work is titled Bittersweet. It’s the first full-length play the 21-year-old Glasgow-based actress has written.

She said: “It’s based on a young couple called Lucy and Jordan, and they are very much in love – what they believe is love – until Lucy discovers that she’s pregnant. And then the cracks slowly start to show, because they want different things, and find themselves on opposing sides of the abortion argument.

“Lucy wants to have the pregnancy terminated and Jordan wants to keep the baby – and it’s that push and pull of does Jordan have a right to keep the baby even though it’s Lucy’s body? It becomes clear one of them will need to sacrifice what they want in order to save this relationship.

“I wanted to explore what it means to love someone and what it means to actually be in love with someone, because I feel like they’re two very different things, but sometimes the word love is thrown around. And obviously it’s super relevant with everything that’s going on just now in America and Northern Ireland.”

Findlay added: “With acting I’m used to just performing other people’s words, but to perform my own piece of writing – and rehearsing it – has been a really interesting experience.

“With a lot of the smaller things I wrote before this play I was using things that were happening in my own life. But once they fizzled out, the writing was fizzling out. This was the first thing I started to write that wasn’t based on personal experience, and there was a never a point that I felt uninspired to write. I found it a lot easier.”

Nelson, 24, was previously based in Hull and York. She has been trying to develop her own theatre company on top of working in a full-time job. Her play, Soft Boy, explores a relationship between two characters after one discovers her boyfriend committed sexual assault in a previous encounter.

Nelson said: “In the play, Dan’s girlfriend is revisiting their memories, trying to find the warning signs. Dan is trying to revisit the memories to show that it was all real and how they fell in love.

“Something that really struck me in the #MeToo culture was what the girlfriends or the wives or the other ones in their lives are left with, and what they have to then piece together. Do you go back on everything you knew about the person, or do they hold true despite having this other side to them?

I also felt very strongly that we’re in a period now where we’re finding out about men who – for whatever reason – people would not ever expect of something like this, but a lot of the men who do this are not necessarily the monsters they are painted in the media.

“It’s kind of a result of toxic masculinity culture – so ‘the nice guys’ or ‘the beta male’. He’s the nice, easygoing guy who you would never think to be toxic necessarily, but his sexual desires can come from a place of deep-rooted toxicity and aggressive cultures.”

ELT has produced shows and run theatre classes for more than 25 years, with a focus on homegrown Scottish talent.

The two plays will run at Hill Street Theatre, which ELT manages, from Monday to Sunday next week, with tickets priced £12 (£10).

You can buy tickets on the Fringe website as well as at the box office, with tickets for Soft Boy also available at www.ticketsource.co.uk/edinburgh-little-theatre.