My Journey: Miriam Battye
Miriam Battye’s connection to the National Youth Theatre centres on a play written for its young people. In 2015 NYT commissioned her to write Electricity for NYT Playing Up. Playing Up is one of the company’s free accredited programmes, designed to help young people into training and work in the creative industries. Electricity follows four young people whose lives are sent into a spin by an incident on the London Underground. It premiered at the Arcola Theatre in 2015, directed by Carolina Giammetta. Eleven years later, by which time Battye had become known as a writer on HBO’s Succession, the NYT brought the play back. In July 2026, as part of its 70th anniversary year, a new Playing Up company performed Electricity at the NYT Workshop Theatre, directed by Hamish MacDougall.
Miriam Battye is a playwright and screenwriter from Manchester, who has also been based in Bristol. Her early plays include Trip the Light Fantastic for Bristol Old Vic and BBC Radio 4, All Your Gold at Theatre Royal Plymouth and Balance at the Royal Exchange in Manchester.
Writing for young performers has run through her career. She wrote Find a Partner! for National Theatre Connections, the National Theatre’s festival in which youth theatres across the UK stage newly commissioned plays. Her work has also travelled: in 2019 the New York company November Theatre announced the premiere of her play Pancake Day at The Tank.
In 2020 she received the Royal Court’s Harold Pinter Commission, and the theatre staged her play Scenes with girls that year. Strategic Love Play followed in 2023, produced by Paines Plough with Soho Theatre and the Belgrade Theatre, and Virgins opened at Soho Theatre in 2026. Her plays are published by Nick Hern Books. Alongside her stage plays she has written for television, including Amazon’s Dead Ringers.