Black Hole SIGN Wins Sixth Hector MacMillan Award for Best Scottish Play

The Scottish Society of Playwrights has announced that the winner of the sixth Hector MacMillan Award for Best New Scottish Play of 2025 is Black Hole Sign by Uma Nada-Rajah.

Uma Nada-Rajah is a Scottish playwright and a practising critical care nurse in NHS Scotland. A graduate of Ecole Philippe Gaulier, she came up through the Young Writers' Programmes at both the Traverse Theatre and the Royal Court, and won the New Playwrights Award from Playwrights' Studio Scotland in 2014. Her debut full-length play Exodus premiered at the Traverse in August 2022, and her writing has since been recognised with the Kavya Prize (2022) and a place on the Shakespeare is Dead International Selection (2024). She was recently Political Comedy Writer-in-Residence at the National Theatre of Scotland, and is currently under commission to the Almeida Theatre and Citizens Theatre.

Set over the longest night shift of the year, Black Hole Sign takes place in a crumbling, understaffed A&E department where a hole has appeared in the roof. Senior Charge Nurse Crea strives to deliver safe and effective care while porter Billy angles after a date; Staff Nurse Ani juggles a bursting caseload, knowing no one is at a dying patient's bedside for his final moments; a septuagenarian patient is trapped in a disco-fuelled fever dream; and a disgruntled complainant prepares his strongly worded letter. Drawing on Nada-Rajah's own nursing career and on interviews she carried out with nurses, porters and patients, the play takes a razor-sharp scalpel to the absurdities, tragedies and hilarity within one of Scotland's most beloved but besieged institutions.

Uma said, “Writing Black Hole Sign was an attempt to capture a moment in time: post-pandemic nursing in Scotland. I was keen to do justice to the experience and spent months carrying out in-depth interviews with colleagues. It was very special to see the play brought to life by a wonderful team who treated the play with such care.

I feel so deeply honoured to have won the Hector with this play. The chair of the SSP called me on my way to night shift at the hospital and it's a moment I won't forget. It means so much to me, coming from fellow playwrights.”

Black Hole Sign had its world premiere at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow in September 2025, transferring to the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in October 2025, in a co-production between Tron Theatre Company and Traverse Theatre Company in association with the National Theatre of Scotland. The play was directed by Traverse Artistic Director Gareth Nicholls. It is published as a playscript by Faber Drama.

SSP Chair Kris Haddow said, ''This year's Hector was won by a play that could only have come from inside the system it dissects. Uma brings the authenticity of her own nursing career to the stage, and the result is a moving piece that's as funny as it is devastating—exactly the kind of bold, necessary new writing the Hector exists to celebrate. It's also a fantastic example of Scottish theatre's producing companies working in partnership, with the Tron, the Traverse and the National Theatre of Scotland all backing this critically acclaimed drama from commission to stage to publication. Black Hole Sign was the outright favourite among playwrights, receiving more than half the votes cast across over forty nominated plays.”

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