The UP News is a comprehensive program magazine that accompanies every production of the University Players. The magazine illuminates the production from aesthetic, historical, and artistic perspectives, provides insight behind the scenes, and informs its readers about the many activities associated with the University Players. It gives you the opportunity to gain essayistic and editorial experience and to launch a veritable publication. We welcome creative, analytic, essayistic, and review writing – and other genres that you might bring to the table. Check out the UP News blog on up-news.de.

If you enjoy writing outside obligatory term papers, this is a great opportunity to gain some editing and publishing experience. There are two rounds of feedback, one focusing on the content and your line of argument, the second purely on language. We’re proud to only have native speakers and lecturers from the language-practice department involved for the linguistic review.

Upcoming production: THAT FACE

Polly Stenham’s That Face is a dark, realistic play about a deeply dysfunctional upper-class family. It follows siblings Mia and Henry, whose lives are dominated by their unstable, alcoholic mother Martha and their largely absent father. After Mia is expelled from school for drugging another student, the family is forced back together, exposing their toxic relationships. Henry sacrifices his own life to care for his mother, while Martha manipulates and depends on him in unhealthy ways.

The play explores themes of addiction, neglect, and the breakdown of family relationships, showing how love can become damaging when it turns obsessive and controlling.

If you’re interested in writing for this issue, we will provide a copy of the play.

Suggested Topics

Essays

The play addresses a range of topics and can be viewed from numerous angles. While we are very open to your suggestions, we suggest these topics to write about:

• the legacy of in-yer-face theatre in British drama after 2000
• relationship between the comic and the tragic; what do we make of this distinction in contemporary playwriting and aesthetic experience?
• Polly Stenham’s oeuvre
• addiction and codependency (especially within the family)
• maternal ‘boy craziness’ and the romanticization of parent–child bonds
• abuse, and toxic cycles in boarding school culture
• concepts of the „family“ and their failures vis-a-vis
  • parentified children
  • failure in parenting
  • absent fatherhood
  • divorce

For your article, you’re welcome to draw on any sources, be they theoretical and academic, real-life events, other plays and literature or anything else. Yet, all pieces are tethered to the same ground, which is our production of THAT FACE. Your piece will thus be strongest—and appear the least arbitrary—if you can tie your argument back to the play or the way it is staged. So please consider including references to or lines from the play to substantiate your essay and ground it in the context of its publication.

Creative Writing

We welcome all sorts of creative writing and don’t feel restricted in terms of genre; we are interested in publishing poetry, prose, or dramatic pieces. You can take off from the issues addressed above or anything else in the play that resonates with you. While you might delve into one of the themes of the play—and spin it in any way required by your work—you can also take off from the work more closely and work with the characters, think about prequels, sequels, or alternative realities. These are just suggestions, shape your own space and page.

Dates

Bound both to the start of the semester as well as printing deadlines, the UP News has a rather tight schedule. These are the deadlines:

Submission: 6 May 2026
You will receive a review focusing on content and argument by 10 May 2026.

Revised version (content): 15 May 2026
You will receive a review focusing on language by 19 May 2026.

Final version: 22 May 2026
You will receive the proofs (PDF for printing) for your approval at end of May / early June. You will need to respond within three days.

We are aware that the timing for this issue is rough. If you can hand in your work any sooner, this might give you more time to work on your piece between each review and the subsequent new version. We will do our best.

Length

Articles should be:

• 500–600 words (1 page) or
• 1,000–1,200 words (2 pages)

Poems or other short pieces of creative writing are also welcome if they are related to the play (these can be longer but should not exceed 1,800 words).

The UP News is an English-language magazine, but we also accept and publish German contributions.

Blog

There are no fixed deadlines for publications online. If you set out to write for the blog, you should aim at roughly 600 words.

Get in touch

Interested? If you consider publishing with us, it would be a good idea to reach out before submission to suss out whether your topic is already being covered, or if your own idea is a good fit for this issue. You will also receive the stylesheet which we will ask you to follow. This will also help us all to avoid having to choose between two essays on the same subject. The best way to reach us is by email: editors@up-news.de. We will get back to you ASAP but definitely within 48 hours.

If you cannot meet the deadlines this time but want to join the writers pool so as to be informed about the next opportunities, drop us a line as well.