Jane McCulloch is both a writer and a director but when she accepted the invitation to judge the six finalists in this year's Bermuda Musical & Dramatic Society (BMDS) playwriting competition, 'Famous for 15 Minutes', it was with her writer's hat firmly in place.

The scripts were sent to her in England minus the aspiring playwrights' names, and as she read through them the first time she knew almost at once which play was the winner: Owain Johnston's 'Inter-Mortem'.

"The interesting thing about Owain's play was that it was written for two men. I immediately thought it was a very clever piece of comic writing," Miss McCulloch says.

She was particularly struck by his sense of comic timing, and his facility for writing for theatre, which is a specialised technique. The fact that the play was subsequently rewritten for two women due to casting difficulties did give her pause later on, but would not have altered her decision.

"For me, (the rewrite) changed the nature of the play completely, so it was rather a different piece. It was still very good, and I still thought it was the winner, but what the audience saw was not what I read. The change was very subtle, but the relationship between two girls is completely different to that between two men, so in a way I was worried as the judge."

In an overview of the six plays, Miss McCulloch says that while she thought they were all interesting in different ways, some of them were "over-complicated".

"In15 minutes you have to do the full aspect of a full-length play: produce the plot, introduce people to the characters, have your main play development, and finish with some denouement. The end has to be a wind-up which pulls all of the strands together. That takes a great deal of doing, and the temptation is to try to make it over-complicated."

While some plays "were obviously better than others", the judge felt all of them were clever and had some very good points. However, 'Inter-Mortem' stood out as being consistently good and original.

"The wonderful thing about Owain's play was that it was totally original idea. It was very good comedy, which is almost more difficult to write than drama, tragedy or detective plays," she says. "I read them all several times, but I had made my choice almost by the end of the first read. It had the perfect structure for a 15-minute play."

As a writer of many works herself, Miss McCulloch is particularly pleased that, through its playwriting competition, the BMDS is encouraging people to write for theatre.

"Theatre writers are the unsung heroes. They start with a blank sheet, whereas actors and directors are interpreters," she says.