Tuesday, October 31, 2006

This is how I feel about Theatre


Read it.
Its bang on the money.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/theatre/2006/10/from_page_to_stage.html
and i cut and paste it too just cos it really sums up how i feel


Where are all the good new playwrights?
Theatres tell us that new writing is at the top of their agenda. But their schemes sure aren't working.
Lyn Gardner
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October 30, 2006 04:46 PM Printable version
A decade ago this week British theatre was enjoying its greatest flowering of new writing since the Jacobeans. Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking had just opened at the Royal Court Upstairs at the Ambassadors, just one of an abundance of new plays written by emerging talents such as Martin McDonagh, David Eldridge, Simon Bent, Nick Grosso and David Greig who all premiered their first major plays during 1996.
A decade on, all those writers are going strong, but where are the emerging talents of today? My guess is that they are clogged up somewhere in Britain's burgeoning playwrighting schemes unable to find their way out. Over the last few years many theatres have put in place extensive play development programmes, yet despite these schemes there has been a tailing off in good new plays by great new writers since the heady days of the mid-90s.
While many new writing theatres and companies have seen an upturn in the number of plays they receive and generate through such schemes -in some cases more than 3,000 scripts a year - from where I'm sitting it often doesn't feel as if there has been a similar upturn in quality. Perhaps - perish the thought - all that play development schemes do is to encourage not particularly talented people to write more and more plays. The danger here is that genuine talent will be missed because with so many plays in development it gets increasingly hard to see the wood for the trees.
Theatres have always worked closely with writers. Very few plays - whether by new or established writers - pop through the letterbox in perfect shape. The relationship between writer and literary manager has historically been a crucial one. But in the past the plays that were developed were being developed to a purpose: the staging of that play. The meetings, the drafts, the workshop and the rehearsed reading were all part of a process that was leading towards production, not an end in themselves.
Over the last 10 years a new play development culture - based on American models - has taken root in British theatres and it is now so firmly embedded that it has become an industry in itself. These schemes are not always hungry for new talent and there is little evidence that they are producing better plays. Those who have jobs in this growing industry have a vested interest in the schemes continued growth, as do the theatres who have squeezed money from public or private sources to fund such schemes often in the name of access. But, if playwrighting schemes worked, every new play you saw would be outstanding. They are not.
Theatres are understandably keen to broaden their pool of writers. Most theatres still see a 30/70 ratio of women to male writers, and black and Asian writers are woefully under-represented. Access is important, but what's the point of providing access to schemes to develop plays but not to the stages themselves? It's like teaching people to swim but then denying them access to swimming pools. There is something cockeyed about a theatre culture that has put so many structures in place to develop plays and so few to stage them. The opportunities to get work staged--and it is only when a play is in front of an audience that a playwright really learns how their play works - are simply not keeping pace as the pool of writers.
Theatres know this, and yet still they hang onto plays trying to keep their options open. Play development should be about enabling writers, not tying up their talent in a queue of unproduced plays. It is often a mirage, a substitute for real action and commitment by a theatre to a writer and his or her play. It provides the theatres with an opportunity to tick all the right funding boxes while offering playwrights very little at all - except misplaced hope.
Being able to list the significant writers that it has discovered has always been part of a theatre's identity and history, and there's nothing wrong with that, but funding pressures mean that competition for writers and plays is increasingly intense. The more play righting programmers there are in place, the more the schemes have to justify themselves. It leads to the creation of a culture of "ownership" of plays, with theatres sometimes exerting pressure on writers to ditch the play they really want to write and generate a new idea "in house" so that the theatre can argue that it was only by the writer being in their particular programme that the play could have been written.
If playwrighting development programmes really worked wouldn't we be seeing more emerging talent than we did a decade ago when such schemes were rare? Maybe there are just not enough good new plays to go round and perhaps these schemes are simply a way of disguising that fact and making Britain's new play culture seem more buoyant than it really is.
If you are a playwright, work in play development or are regular theatregoer I'd be interested to know what you think, but I'm beginning to believe that however many playwrighting development schemes you put in place real talents such as Sarah Kane, Caryl Churchill or David Eldridge will only come along a couple of times in every decade.

3 comments:

Lucy Ann Wade said...

I've put a link to this on my blog too. It does sum up a lot of how I feel about Momentum. I mean, I will still continue to go to Momentum, but I do feel that it would be nice to have chance to develop our plays, rather than just being encouraged to write them. Also, I think that there's no encouragement about what to do with our plays after the session is over - if TWP don't want to include your work in their festival, then that's it, and it's very easy to let your work fall to the wayside, rather than shop it around or try to develop it on your own. There's little information provided on how to go about and do those things, as though (for example) the Leicester Haymarket is the only theatre in existance, and if they don't want it, then that's the end of the line for that play. Even putting on new plays locally would be a good initiative. Perhaps after LadyFest I will start again looking into putting on our own play festival.

Sabrina Mei-Li Smith said...

Well hte best way to develop an art form is to react against the norm or status quo! I think that The Momentm programme is good to give us a startingbord for really doing what WE want to. Its that whole "Take on bord the rules before you break them... then you really know what your fighting against" (End quote Drunk Emma Rosoman!)

Damien G Walter said...

Writer development is a thorny issue overall, as is any kind of artist development. The problem with many development schemes I've experienced (Momentum not among them as I don't really know it) is that they lack any real ability to produce the work of the people they are developing. They also miss out on the fact that traditional producers in literature - theatres, publishers etc, do lots of development work with the people they work with. Given the option between a place on a writer development scheme or 5 minutes with an editor from a big publlisher, I'd take the 5 minutes every time.