Phone Plays is the first publication in Scores, a new imprint co-commissioned by Montez Press and London Performance Studios that publishes scripts and performance texts by artists, theatre-makers and performance-makers working between the visual and theatrical arts.

Intended to be performed live over the phone, Sam Cottington’s Phone Plays invite readers and audience members alike to engage with a series of unclear relationships and scenarios, invoked and mediated by contemporary communication technology.

This collection of plays explore what critic Sianne Ngai has called the ‘gimmicks of production’: those moments when an object or person performs too much or too little; when it’s too easy, undeserving of praise or overly produced, trying too hard, camp; and how in those moments, the sublimated labour in everyday judgements of taste or aesthetic value are revealed. Channelling conventions of soap opera and sci-fi, these plays explore the experiences of desire, subjugation and alienation inherent in communication.


Sarah Kane meets Linda Rosenkrantz!
– Hannah Regel

Sam Cottington tests the elasticity of language and form with an astute kind of mischief and poet’s touch. I’ll read anything Cottington writes.
– Marlowe Granados

Sam Cottington’s Phone Plays achieve an unusual balance between poetry and directness. By way of their formal constraints, they read as works of abstraction, and nonetheless have that messed-up, very human quality so characteristic of Cottington’s writing—a certain nerve that infuses the language and tells you: you’re still a person.
– Kristian Vistrup Madsen

Phone Plays has inspired me to make my phone calls more theatrical: to parrot myself, parody myself, to talk in pranks, poems and perversities—and to do it whether there’s somebody on the other end or not.
– Derek McCormack

A staccato joy, Phone Plays beat and twist, and make you just want to keep going and going.
– Calla Henkel