Satinder Chohan

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

Featuring four new plays written and devised in collaboration with groups of secondary school children, this collection examines immigration to and emigration from the UK. A theatre-in-education project coordinated by Tamasha theatre company and The Migration Museum, children worked on exercises designed to develop their understanding of, and feelings about, migration. Their reactions were then incorporated into a piece of theatre by a professional playwright that the students then performed. This collection brings together these plays along with the unique exercises that inspired them. The plays include: Nothing to Declare by Sharmila Chauhan follows three precious keepsakes and the stories attached to them as their owners are stopped at a hostile border. Potato Moon by Satinder Chohan focuses on the potatoes buried in a share allotment. They become people’s memories in a magical realist Southall and so when they start to go missing, schoolgirl Mira set out to find out why. Wilkommen by Asif Khan follows 11 year Ammar on the most dangerous journey of his life, from war-torn country, across sea and land, to take up the offer of a new life in Europe. Jigsaw by Sumerah Srivstav tells the story of how three angels, horrified by mankind’s cruelty, prepare to wipe them out… until they find an unlikely friend who changes their mind. This is an invaluable collection that gives both teachers the resources to address the sometimes tricky issues surrounding migration and students the opportunity to create and in doing so counteract and humanize the narratives hear in the media and society as a whole.