These are the Rules and additional Information for candidates for the RTST Sir Peter Hall Director Award 2026. How to enter is below.

If you require access support with respect to the entry materials or the workshops, please refer to the section entitled Accessibility, below

Eligibility 

To be eligible to enter for the RTST Sir Peter Hall Director Award 2026:

  • You must be permanently resident in the United Kingdom.
  • You must be aged 18 or over.
  • You must have a proven and demonstrable track record of directing professional theatre productions, as explained below.  Relevant experience would include being a sole, lead, joint, assistant or associate director of a professional theatre production.
  • At a minimum, though, you must have been the sole or lead director of two professional theatre productions as defined below in a theatre or theatres with 250 or fewer seats as further explained below. 
  • You must (if short-listed) be available to participate in an estimated one-hour workshop (and, if selected, an interview), in central London, anytime specified by the RTST between 9.30 am and 6.30 pm on the weekend of Saturday 7 and Sunday 8 November 2026.  You might need to attend on both days if your workshop is on the Saturday and you are called back for interview on the Sunday. 
  • You must please comply with the other Rules as stipulated below.

Terms & Definitions: the following outlines, as transparently as possible, what we mean when we say “professional theatre production”. Please read thoroughly.

For the purpose of these Rules, the term “professional theatre production” includes fringe productions but excludes amateur productions and productions on which you worked as a student and/or in an educational context, such as drama school productions.

The Award scheme is designed to give a director a career-breakthrough and first-time opportunity to direct a play as part of a main programme or season of plays of a mid-scale producing theatre.  For this reason, the general Rule is that you will NOT be eligible to enter if you have already originated and directed (or are contracted to originate and direct), as a sole or lead director, a professional theatre production as part of a main programme or season of plays in a theatre with more than 250 seats.  We call this “the over-250-seat cut-off rule”. 

The RTST recognises, however, that productions take many forms, and that, in some cases, it might not be fair for a director’s production in a theatre with over 250 seats to be equated with the career-first opportunity presented by this Award, thereby automatically rendering that director ineligible to enter for the Award.  Such cases might include:  staged readings; runs shorter than two weeks; touring visits (e.g., if a director originates and directs a play in a small, say 100-seat, theatre, and the play happens to tour and, on that tour, visits a theatre with, say, 400 seats); and charity performances. If a director directs a public show at an accredited drama school in an auditorium of over 250 seats, that will also not automatically disqualify the director from entering for the Award. 

If you have directed a professional theatre production in a theatre with 250 or more seats, and you believe there is a good reason why it should not disqualify you, you must set out full information about that production and that reason in the CV that you submit with your entry. You may, if you wish, consult the RTST on contact@rtst.org.uk before submitting an entry to check if you are ineligible under this “over-250-seat cut-off” rule, but the RTST cannot guarantee an answer before the entry deadline.

The RTST will exercise its discretion with respect to the “over-250-seat cut-off” rule on a case-by-case basis.

You must please tell us about all your professional theatre production directing experience AND about all your contracts and commitments, if any, to direct future productions.

How to Enter

To enter for the Award, you must submit online:

 together with:

  • your CV, which must include detailed information on your entire professional track record as a director, specifying in the case of each professional theatre production the information specified under the section headed “Your CV + Supporting Material” below.

If you have any technical issues with completing and/or submitting the Entry Form, please contact Cait Laws at C.Laws@exeter.ac.uk outlining your query.

If you have any questions regarding the Award Rules, including your eligibility, or the Award process, please contact:  contact@rtst.org.uk

Please refer to the Information below to guide you on how to complete the Entry Form.

Sign-in

To access the Entry Form, you will need a google account. This is so that we can protect your data and process the applications in the safest and most efficient way possible. If you don’t have an account already, you can sign up for free with your existing email (you don’t need an @gmail) by clicking “Create Account” when the page opens:

You will be able to make and save changes to your Entry Form prior to submission.  You will not be able to edit your Entry Form after submission.

Questions in the Entry Form

The questions that make up your entry are split into 3 sections: 

  • Your Chosen Idea
  • Your Concept + Alternative Play Options
  • Your CV + Supporting Material

You have the option to submit a video response to answer the questions in the ‘Your Concept’ section.


At the end of the questions, you may upload visual stimulus on 1 side of A4 to help convey your concept in .pdf format.  The Panel, at their discretion, will not read/watch anything over the limits specified in the Entry Form.

Your CV + Supporting Material

All documents in this section must be uploaded in .pdf format and be less than 10mb each.

Your CV must include detailed information on your entire professional track record as a director, specifying for each professional theatre production:

  • the name of the theatre and the particular auditorium in question;
  • the dates of the production;
  • and whether you were assistant, associate, sole or lead director.

Wherever possible, you should insert a hyperlink as evidence of the production.

You must also specify future directing commitments. 

In practice, in order to satisfy the above requirements, you may find that you need to supplement the information in your usual CV.

The onus is on you to provide clear evidence of your experience in accordance with the above requirements, including satisfaction of the minimum requirement of having directed at least two professional theatre productions in theatre or theatres with fewer than 250 seats. This should be readily ascertainable from your entry.  The RTST and Exeter Northcott Theatre cannot accept responsibility for undertaking enquiries of you or third parties or other research into information you provide.  Therefore, if your eligibility is not readily ascertainable from your entry, the RTST reserves the right to treat your entry as ineligible.

You may submit 1 page of A4 of visual references or inspiration to help convey your concept.

Accessibility

We can provide access support for completing your Entry Form and/or for attending the workshops. This might include provision of information in an alternative format, BSL interpreters, scribes, access workers, transport and formatting assistance.

The Entry Form provides the option for any candidate to submit certain information by video.

If you do not have equipment to record an entry at home, we can facilitate a recorded zoom conversation.

The RTST and Exeter Northcott Theatre will ensure the workshop space is as accessible as possible and support any access requirements you may have during the workshop process should you succeed in reaching this stage.

To request support or simply more information on how we might assist you, please email contact@rtst.org.uk

Guidance for Candidates

You may choose your entry play from the following list of options:

Classic or modern play

  • To be accepted as a “modern play” for these purposes, a play must previously have been professionally produced in the UK or overseas.

Novel

  • An existing adaptation for the stage of a classic and/or modern novel.  

Film

  • An existing adaptation for the stage of a cinematic film.  

Your choice of play must be in the English language.

Cast

Whatever the play you pitch, it must be possible to stage it with no more than eight actors.

Your choice should not require community participation.

Further things to bear in mind…

When thinking about your answers to the questions set out in the Entry Form, please consider the following points:

● We are excited to hear your original ideas. In what respects will your production be imaginative, surprising and engaging? Are you uncovering something in the work that audiences are unlikely to have seen before?

● When choosing your production, please consider how it will engage a broad range of audiences in Exeter, Newcastle, Salisbury and Northampton. We are interested in how your ideas and your production will interact with such audiences. 

● As well as hearing about your passion for your chosen play, we are also keen to hear how you would approach making work at scale, and what you think are the particular demands and opportunities of this. Please consider how your production will sit in a mid-scale space.  At Exeter Northcott Theatre and at all the other tour venues, the production would be end-on.

● Does your play provide meaningful opportunities for a diverse cast of no more than eight actors?

● Other play options.  For the reasons given in the “Ultimate Play” paragraph below, the play ultimately directed by the winner might not be the play that is the principal focus of their Entry Form. With this in mind, we have deliberately kept these guidelines as broad as possible – inviting you to propose a production that gives us a strong sense of your vision and taste. Once the winning director has been selected, there will be a supported process of selecting the text for production in conversation with the creative teams of Exeter NorthcottTheatre and its partner theatres. To prepare for that, the Entry Form invites you to think about alternative existing texts, for no more than eight actors, that you feel have strong audience appeal and are ripe for revisiting here and now.

● The Entry Form specifies word counts for — and, in the optional cases of video recordings, timings of — your responses to various items. Please note that these are maximum permitted word counts and timings.  Therefore, please do not feel that you must treat them as targets; you will not be penalised if you can express your ideas in fewer words or less time. 

● We do understand and respect the fact that entering for this Award involves a lot of time, effort and creative thinking in generating your own particular concept for a production.  We hope that, regardless of the outcome of your entry, this is a useful process for you as an artist, and if you are unsuccessful, you might nevertheless find that you have a concept for a production that is sufficiently developed to be useful in other contexts.

Entry Deadline and Other Dates

Entries for the 2026 Award scheme have to be received by no later than 6.00pm on Monday, 21 September 2026.

The RTST reserves the right to extend the deadline for entries – either generally or, if it considers it to be equitable to do so in exceptional circumstances, in individual cases.

Dates given by the RTST in relation to the process for selecting the winner of the RTST Sir Peter Hall Director Award 2026 are indicative only and subject to change at the RTST’s discretion.

Long-list

All entries will be carefully reviewed and considered by the RTST with the assistance of Exeter Northcott Theatre with a view to producing a long-list of up to 20 entries.

Candidates will be notified in writing whether they have, or have not, been included on the Long-list. 

Regrettably, it will not be feasible to give meaningful feedback to candidates who are not Long-listed.

Short-list

The Long-list of written entries will be submitted for consideration by the full Selection Panel.

The Selection Panel will agree upon a Short-list of up to eight candidates.

The Long-listed candidates whose entries are not included in the Short-list will be notified in writing.  They will be provided with brief written feedback after the Award process is complete – if they request it or otherwise at the discretion of the Chair of the Panel.

Workshop

If you are Short-listed, you will be invited by email to attend a one-hour workshop on Saturday, 7 or Sunday, 8 November 2026.   The workshop will be in a central London venue.  You will, if practicable, be given a couple of weeks’ notice if you are called to a workshop.

It is a condition of your entering for the Award that you are available for attending such a workshop (and, if selected, a subsequent interview) if required by the RTST, on both days.

In a workshop, you will be required to direct professional actors in a text-based scene from a play settled in advance with the RTST.  The workshop will be observed by the Selection Panel. You will be interviewed at the end of this workshop.

Further information on the workshops will be notified in advance to candidates who are Short-listed to participate in them.

Finalists’ Interviews

Up to four of those who attend the workshops will be selected and called back for a second interview by the Selection Panel.

These interviews, which will be the concluding stage in the selection process, will occur towards the end of the second day of the workshops or as soon as practicable thereafter.  The Selection Panel will select an Award winner and an official Runner-up.

The Award-winner and official Runner-up will be publicly announced by the RTST and Exeter Northcott Theatre as soon as practicable after the workshops and, until announced, should remain confidential.

Selection Panel

The RTST reserves the right to substitute members of the Selection Panel, or to add further members.

It is the intention that all members of the Selection Panel participate in all stages of the selection process as indicated above, but individual members might be unavailable at certain times.

Ultimate Play

While it is intended that the play directed by the Award-winner will be the play that is the subject of their entry, this outcome cannot be guaranteed owing to a variety of factors, such as:  availability of rights; pre-arranged or historical programming at Exeter Northcott Theatre and/or any of the other participating theatres; and/or new ideas arising from the creative relationship struck between the winning director and Exeter Northcott Theatre and those other theatres.  In 2023, the play directed by the 2022 winner was the play featured in their entry; in other years, the play ultimately directed by the winner has been different from the one featured in their entry; but, in every case, the play ultimately directed has been chosen by mutual agreement between the winner and the producing theatre and, where applicable, its co-producers. 

Contract between the winner and Exeter Northcott Theatre

If you win the RTST Sir Peter Hall Director Award 2026, you will be required to enter into a contract with Exeter Northcott Theatre in order to undertake the role of director of the Production. Your fee will be £9,000 plus expenses.

Please note that rehearsals for the Production will take place in Exeter and accommodation expenses will be provided if required.

Feedback to candidates

The RTST understands the desire for feedback of candidates who are unsuccessful in the Award selection process.

The RTST also appreciates that it would be unreasonable and unrealistic to try to require its partner-theatre – this year, Exeter Northcott Theatre – to give an open-ended commitment of management time to providing meaningful feedback to each and every candidate who enters for, but does not win, the Award regardless of the number of such candidates. The provision of feedback is therefore calibrated as follows:

  • Candidates who do not make it on to the Longlist are, regrettably, not entitled to feedback.
  • Candidates who are Longlisted but are not subsequently Shortlisted are entitled to brief written feedback – upon request by them to the RTST, or otherwise at the discretion of the Chair of the Panel.  As applicable, this feedback will be provided as soon as practicable after the public announcement of the Award-winner.
  • Candidates who are Shortlisted and participate in the Director Workshops but are ultimately unsuccessful at this final stage are entitled to one-to-one feedback from the Chair of the Selection Panel in an in-person or virtual meeting. These meetings will be arranged as soon as practicable after the public announcement of the Award-winner.

Promotional Activities

By entering the Award scheme, you agree that, if you win, you shall participate in such promotional activity with the media with respect to the RTST Sir Peter Hall Director Award 2026, the RTST and Exeter Northcott Theatre and its co-producers – including submitting to interviews, photographic shoots and filming and attending an Award ceremony in central London – as the RTST shall reasonably stipulate.

Travel Expenses

The RTST will, at its discretion, contribute towards the reasonable travel expenses incurred by any candidate in travelling to and from a workshop, provided such candidate is travelling from home or place of work outside Greater London and provides receipts or other supporting evidence to the RTST.

The above proviso that the candidate must be travelling from outside Greater London does not apply in the case of any candidate who requires support accessing the workshop space.

Disqualification

The RTST reserves the absolute right at any time to disqualify from the Award scheme any entrant:

  • who ceases to be UK resident or otherwise fails to comply with the Rules of the Award scheme;
  • who has failed to supply all the information required by the Entry Form;
  • who is found to have supplied materially inaccurate information to the RTST in the Entry Form or otherwise; or
  • who, in the opinion of the Trustees of the RTST, has brought the Award, the RTST or Exeter Northcott Theatre into disrepute.

Interpretation

Nothing in these Rules places a legal obligation on the RTST to award the RTST Sir Peter Hall Director Award 2026 or to make any payment to any candidate.

The RTST shall determine and resolve any ambiguity in the interpretation of these Rules at its discretion.

Data

As an entrant for the Award, you agree to the use by the RTST and Exeter Northcott Theatre of any personal data supplied by you to the RTST and/or Exeter Northcott Theatre, and to the passing of any of such data to any or all co-producers, the members of the RTST Sir Peter Hall Director Award 2026 Selection Panel and the RTST’s advisers, in any and all cases for use in connection with the RTST Sir Peter Hall Director Award 2026 and the resulting production.

Notifications

Notifications by the RTST to entrants will be given by means of email.  The RTST can accept no responsibility for any failed transmission of emails.

Communications by entrants to the RTST must be made by email to the email address specified in the Entry Form, unless otherwise notified.

How to refer to the Award

If, in the future, you refer to your participation in this Award scheme in social media, your CV, biographies, etc., please refer to it as “the RTST Sir Peter Hall Director Award” (or “the Royal Theatrical Support Trust Sir Peter Hall Director Award”), and use the hashtag #RTSTDirector Award (or #RTSTSirPeterHallDirectorAward ). Reference to the RTST or the Royal Theatrical Support Trust/RTST will differentiate this Award from other awards and schemes that now or in the future bear Sir Peter Hall’s name.

Governing Law

The Award scheme is governed by and shall be construed in accordance with the laws of England, and the courts of England shall have exclusive jurisdiction in relation to it.