These seven plays are some of 7-ON alliance's personal favourites. They were awarded, or gloriously produced, or a risky breakthrough, or still burn with intense relevance but never made it into print — until now.

Original fairy-tales were about bravado, fortune, destiny and courage. But always, watching from the edges, were the quiet ones. The bit characters. The weary mothers, the ugly sisters, the irrelevant queens, the grandmothers. In The Magic Hour, they get their chance to shine.

Seven playwrights. Fifteen plays. Short plays, but whole worlds contained in them. Huge windows into the minds and times of seven extraordinary writers for the theatre.

Loneliness, fear, bad dreams, repressed attraction or repugnance, lockdown and sudden escapes, jigsaw puzzles, food deliveries, bad tempers and penguins. Like a modern-day journal of the plague year, this collection of monologues and scenes is a time capsule reflecting the lived experience of these five playwrights during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Twelve-year-old Celeste - 'half French, half Chinese and all Australian' - travels to China to scatter her mother's ashes. There she meets her grandmother, Por Por, a ghost-hunter. When Celeste learns she may have inherited her grandmother's talent, she must decide whether to acknowledge her gifts and use them to save her family and friends, and if she has the strength needed for the job.

All Jed’s friends have moved to the city, but he still lives with his two mothers in a small town. Since finishing high school, the frustrations of coastal life are looming large. And something is being hidden from him about the illness facing one of his mothers.

On 23 October 2002, Chechen rebels stormed a theatre in Moscow, holding hundreds of theatregoers hostage. Three days later, in Newcastle, Australia, a young man staged an armed robbery in a bookshop.