Ones to watch in 2026: Milly Sweeney, playwright
Milly Sweeney is a young playwright full of talent and ideas, with her latest work opening the new Play, Pie and Pint season at Glasgow’s Oran Mor. Interview by Joyce McMillan
When Milly Sweeney’s play Water Colour opened in the studio theatre at Pitlochry last May, it caused something of a sensation. Set in contemporary Glasgow, the play tells the tale of two young people, aged around 20, who meet in a moment of crisis, as she – Esme, a struggling art student – seems set to jump to her death off a Glasgow bridge; and he, a working class lad called Harris, tries to save her life, only to find that the incident unleashes long-suppressed demons in his own mind.
As a script, the play had already won the 2024 St Andrews Playwriting Award, which guarantees a professional production presented at both the Byre Theatre and Pitlochry; and on stage, Sweeney’s beautifully balanced intertwined monologues – performed to perfection by Molly Geddes and Ryan J Mackay, in a production by Sally Reid – fairly pulsed with life and poetry, creating a rich world of human experience in just over an hour. The Stage, in a rare five-star review, described it as “a devastating debut about depression, desperation and connection”; and the play also drew an extraordinary response from audiences in both Pitlochry and St Andrews.
“I was on the bus home from college when I heard I had won the award,” says Sweeney, who is 22, and graduated last year from New College Lanarkshire with a degree in acting and creative enterprise. “The bus was very crowded, and the call came from an unrecognised number, so I nearly didn’t take it. But it was the Scottish Playwrights’ Studio telling me that I had won and I just couldn’t believe it. It would be my first full professional production, and winning the award just changed everything for me.”
Sweeney grew up in Glasgow, and still lives with family in Robroyston. She always loved singing and performing, and in her early primary school years, with strong support from her parents, she went to drama classes at Barmulloch Community Centre, moving on – when they closed down – to the Glasgow Acting Academy, a private drama-class provider which offers young people the chance to create and appear in plays and musicals.
Sweeney – who has had her own struggles with poor mental health – has described the Academy as having “transformed what could have been a very lonely adolescence into one full of community and creativity”; it was there that she found a group of friends and collaborators who still play an important part in her life, not least through their own small company, Cuttin’ Aboot Theatre. And it was one of her Academy teachers, Steve Lauder-Russell, who began to encourage her to write plays of her own.
READ MORE: 2026 Arts Preview: The year ahead in theatre
“I was always writing, even at primary school,” says Sweeney. “I would write wee songs, and most of them were absolutely terrible. I also always wrote poems – I still do. And I’ve always loved the collaborative element of theatre – I was used to writing as part of a group, working with other people’s ideas as well as my own, and I really enjoy that.
“But as I got more into writing, I began to realise that this was something I could do all on my own. I wrote two plays – The Caravel and The Big Day – inspired by my Mum’s teenage experience in the 1990s, and both of them appeared on the Edinburgh Fringe, The Caravel in our own Cuttin’ Aboot production, and The Big Day in a production by Napier University students.
“Water Colour came about, though, because Steve Lauder-Russell suggested I should write something that wasn’t for any of the companies I had already worked with – a grown up play for grown up audiences. It was the first time I’ve ever written anything for complete strangers, for people beyond my own circle. And the response was just amazing; to have so many people coming up to me and telling me how much it meant to them, and how it resonated with their own experience.”
Sweeney still likes to act when she can; she has just finished playing the Snow Queen’s sidekick Jack Frost in the Cumbernauld Theatre panto Baltic. For now, though, writing commitments are at the front of her mind. For the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival, she has already written and performed Almond, a monologue about sinister online groups which encourage young people to develop eating disorders; she hopes the play will tour to Scottish schools in 2026. And her latest play Someone’s Knockin’ At The Door – about her grandparents, who were huge Beatles fans, on a 1970s mission to meet Paul McCartney in Kintyre – will open the Spring 2026 Play, Pie and Pint season at Oran Mor in Glasgow, before travelling on to Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Pitlochry.
“It’s true that things are not easy for my generation of young people,” says Sweeney. “They say that the opposite of depression is connection; and for us, the Covid pandemic broke all sorts of connections, at a crucial time.
“But I do feel that Glasgow has always been an incredibly creative city, and still is. I could name you a dozen people I know who are not just sitting around waiting for creative opportunities to come to them, but are making opportunities for themselves, and it’s great to see that.
“And more widely, I do want people to feel that grim though things can seem, people can get through bad times, and help each other to do it. In a sense, that was the subject of Water Colour – the idea that even complete strangers can give us a vital sense of connection, in our time of need; and that there’s always light and colour among the darkness, both in life, and in the stories I tell.”
Someone’s Knockin’ At The Door is at Oran Mor, Glasgow, 23-28 February; the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 3-7 March; and Pitlochry Festival Theatre, 18-22 March
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