Playmarket is pleased to announce the winner of the ADAM NZ PLAY AWARD for 2026: Liam Hinton for passionfruits.
The Adam NZ Play Award recognises and celebrates the best in unproduced writing for the theatre. Playmarket Tumuaki Murray Lynch announced the winners at Basement Theatre, Tāmaki Makaurau, on 18 April.
Covering two Christmases set a decade apart, passionfruits by Liam Hinton tracks the implosion of a New Zealand family as three generations grapple with cash crises; difference and disconnection; and exhumed resentments.
Described by one of the judges as ‘a New Zealand answer to The Cherry Orchard and Long Day’s Journey into Night’, Hinton’s profoundly human new play is ‘raw, poetic, cruel, theatrical… It’s going to stay with me for a very long time’. Another judge called it ‘layered and complex… The individual characters and their specific relationships to one another feel authentic and reflective of their histories, both shared and specific. Within this story there’s a throughline which highlights how good old Kiwi bloke culture has the potential to lead people to see the world from right-leaning to right-right perspectives’.
Liam Hinton is a Kirikiriroa-based writer and theatremaker; he co-runs local theatre company, One Question Theatre, who have staged five shows to date. Liam’s poetry is published in Starling, Poetry Aotearoa and Mayhem Literary Journal, and he has co-authored a screenplay adaptation of Tracey Slaughter’s novella, The Longest Drink in Town, which received development funding from the New Zealand Film Commission. His first written play, On Travelling Backwards to Punish Ourselves as Ghosts, was staged at The Meteor in 2024.
Runner-Up was Alex MacDonald with Sundance. In this ‘smouldering play’, two Kiwi filmmakers find their otherwise happy marriage thrust into peril when one of them wins a major award. One judge remarked on how skilfully the playwright navigates the relationship between the personal and the professional: ‘so many worthwhile issues are raised here, between the gendered nature of balancing parenting and career, and the ethics of art once it becomes commerce’.
Best Play by a Māori Playwright was won by Tawhi Thomas for his play Haere. Thomas has crafted a sequence of vignettes which explore relationship dynamics between Māori and Pākehā, reflecting tensions and celebrating connections. It questions how far we have really come. Judges described the play as ‘awesome, succinct, effective’.
Best Play by a Woman, Trans or Non-Binary Playwright was won by Kerry Lane for their play The Treehouse. In this delicate chamber work, two siblings try to find a way to reconnect across their wildly difference experiences of the world. One judge described is as a ‘beautiful meditation on grief, sibling relationships, and what it means to live a meaningful life in a suffering world’.
The Adam NZ Play Award, now in its nineteenth year, is the only one of its kind in Aotearoa for new playwriting. Playmarket’s only entrance requirements are that the playwright be a New Zealand citizen or permanent resident and that the play has not yet had a professional production. The award is generously funded by the Adam Foundation. Playmarket is also very grateful for the support of our major funders Foundation North and Creative New Zealand.
Since 2008 there have been 108 shortlisted and winning plays that have been produced in 125 different productions.
Other Finalists:
My Only Fan by Sam Brooks
The Close by Barbara Burke
Mary by Edward Clendon
The Bunker by Simon Ferry
The Mediation by Guy Langford and Simon Bennett
The Terrifyingly Adorable Possibility That Someone Understands You by Melisa K. Martin
Fort by Sheree Veysey
The Magpie’s Call: October 1918 by Sheree Veysey