Martha Watson Allpress

Martha Watson Allpress is an award winning playwright and screenwriter from the East Midlands.

As a screenwriter, Martha wrote Big Winners, the second episode of Channel 5’s inaugural Play For Today series, for which she was then nominated Best Debut Writer at the TV Foundation New Voices Awards. She has multiple original series in development with Mam Tor, Red Planet Pictures, Wall to Wall and Various Artists Ltd. She has also been part of programmes such as BBC Voices and BIFA Springboard. 

As a playwright, her debut show Patricia Gets Ready (for a date with the man that used to hit her), received 5 star reviews from The Guardian, The Stage and Broadway World, and her second, Kick, won the Bill Cashmore Award and was staged for a limited run at the Lyric Hammersmith. In 2023 her play, Lady Dealer, premiered to critical acclaim at Paines Plough’s Roundabout in Edinburgh before transferring to The Bush for a five-week London run, and in the same year Martha won the Ambassador Theatre Group’s Playwrights Prize. In 2025 Martha was commissioned by the National Youth Theatre to write a large scale ensemble piece, Disco Inferno, and she was also announced part of the Orange Tree Writers Collective, who commissioned a community piece, The Long Walk Home, in collaboration with the Otakar Kraus Music Trust.

Martha also works regularly in male prisons throughout England with Kestrel Theatre, teaching creative writing and spoken word, and has facilitated playwriting courses for Hampstead Theatre and Age UK.

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