Madam Plaza

Madam Plaza

One of the pleasures of being in Berlin is the access to a broad range of performance work, much of which we would not necessarily get to see in the UK.

Last week as part of an African/Arabic festival at HAU, I saw an extraordinary encounter between choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen and three ‘Shikhat’ – female performers in Moroccan society whose singing and dancing are central to public rites of passages. For the majority of Moroccans, Shikhat are an indispensible part of religious and national festivity, called upon to entertain at festivals, weddings, circumcisions, naming ceremonies and henna parties, as well as in cabarets and nightclubs. They are both revered and shunned – an ambiguous role explored in Madam Plaza, the performance named after the nightclub where Ouizigen met her co-performers.

You can see Madam Plaza at LIFT in London 25-26 June, and read my commentary for Exuent magazine here:

http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/madam-plaza/

Audiences against cuts in theatres

From Nicola Merrifield of The Stage: 

Ruth Mackenzie has issued a rallying cry to theatre leaders to mobilise their audiences against imminent cuts to public funding for the arts, which are expected as part of the government’s comprehensive spending review taking place at the end of this month.

The director of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad said that theatres need to encourage their audiences, who are “more powerful” than venues, to lobby local and central government and prevent further falls in funding.

It is understood that Arts Council England is asking its funded organisations to model for 5%, 10% or 15% cuts following the CSR, and is briefing companies this week.

Mackenzie said: “The spending review is happening now, and it will be finished by the end of next week. We’ve got only days if we want to try and influence its path.”

She added: “Try to motivate particularly your super fans – those who are your absolute core. Maybe they’re your volunteers, maybe they’re parents of those that do learning and education work, because those are the ones who have a really good script of their own about why you matter.”

Mackenzie, who was speaking at the Theatres Trust conference on Tuesday, warned that one of the “great weaknesses” of past arts campaigns was that they were led by organisations rather than audiences.

“Our audiences can speak more powerfully than us,” she said. “So you’ve got, at most, a week – and in that week if you wished you could mobilise your audience to talk to your local MPs.

She said most ticket buyers for theatres in the UK were women aged between 35 and 60 – the same area of the electorate that chancellor George Osborne was “most concerned with”.

“Your greatest fans are the people he most wants to seduce,” she said.

Warning that the arts sector has been “slightly complacent” about its work being overlooked due to the prioritisation of other public services, such as health and education, by the government, Mackenzie said audiences should have been ready to act last year.

“Your audiences ought to have been ready, your audiences ought to have come out last year. We ought to have had ten million people who go to the theatre every year signing a campaign and going completely crazy just about the threat that the Department for Communities and Local Government could get a 10% cut,” she said.

Mackenzie added that arts venues should establish ways of using their community connections to create a “wonderful tapestry that shows theatre is at the heart of the community”.

“Each one of you needs to stop and reflect on what more you can do because we are running out of time,” she said.

Mackenzie has previously been artistic director of the Chichester and Manchester festivals, as well as being an adviser to government on cultural policy.

To sign up to the My Theatre Matters! campaign, run by The Stage, Equity and the Theatrical Management Association, visit www.mytheatrematters.com

Checklist when writing scenes…. 1.

I was giving some advice to a writer I’m mentoring on some essential elements to consider when revising a scene or planning to write – and thought it might be useful to share a few in a post. Further notes will follow:

IT HAPPENS IN THE PRESENT TENSE. Theatre is alive and happening before us in the moment. Even when recounting past events, the experiences are alive and impacting on the character NOW. Passivity in character, lack of dynamic and drive and exposition arises when events are being reported, or presented as mere information. Your characters should be engaged and active – but remember, even a thought can be action.

WHAT’S AT STAKE? The old chestnut…  What can each character lose or gain from the events and actions of the piece? In a character-driven script, there should be something important at risk, to make the events of the piece matter. If the stakes aren’t high enough, you’re not creating enough dramatic tension and an audience may think ‘so what?’

WHAT DO YOUR CHARACTERS WANT? Each character should be driven, the protagonist of their own lives (even if not the protagonist of the actual play). They should have very specific objectives, so ask what each wants. The answers should not be vague or abstract – ‘he wants love’, ‘she wants fulfilment’ – it should be precise and specific: ‘She wants to get her Mother’s letters back.’ These specific objectives in the moment will KEEP YOUR CHARACTER ACTIVE and the plot and action beating on. The charcater may also have a larger want, a super-objective, but be aware of what they want in each scene and moment – even if it is ‘to shut that bloody awful man up!’

This then impacts on TACTICS: WHAT DO YOUR CHARACTERS DO TO GET WHAT THEY WANT? If your character wants that bloody awful man to shut up, does she attack him, surprise him into silence with unexpected behaviour (a slap or a kiss?), drive him away with her own boredom, does she lie, charm, run away – what? Character is revealed through action and we can learn alot about the character through their interactions and the tactics they use to obtain what they want. This is also how a character grows and learns new skills. They try different approaches to obtain what they want, engaging the audience and also, depending on the challenge of the obstacles they have to overcome to get what they want, prove themselves as worthy protagonists/antagonists.

Through new behaviour and tactics, the character also CHANGES and change is essential in every moment of a script. Whether in dynamics, storyline, relationships, or characterisation, something must have CHANGED, so the end of each scene is different from how it began and we are aware of the MOVEMENT in the scene.

More notes on essential elements of scenes will follow…

Sandra Bendelow. A One Woman Cultural Wave….

Izzy Rabey: EarCandy. Scriptography Productions

Last April my friend the writer Sandra Bendelow wrote a guest post about setting up a writing group.
http://kaiteoreilly.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/setting-up-a-writers-group-guest-blog-by-sandra-bendelow/ 
 Frustrated by the dearth of performance writing opportunities in our neck of the woods (the wilds of West Wales), and tired of waiting for an arts organisation, theatre, or someone ‘official’  to do something about it, she upped tools and started a mini hive of cultural activity herself.

She initiated several writing groups at Aberystwyth arts centre for playwrights and screenwriters, and also established Scriptography Productions, to seek training, development, mentoring, commissioning and production opportunities for writers for performance.Within a terrifyingly short time, Sandra has produced three script-in-hand short rehearsed readings, an evening of short plays, Playpen, two evenings of 20 minute plays and Catrin Fflur Huws’s full length play, To Kill a Machine. The company has also launched a work-in-progress night Crash Test which takes place every three months in Aberystwyth. From a town with no new writing culture, it has suddenly boomed, and all of it is down to the initiative and determination of the fabulous Sandra Bendelow.

The latest project is EarCandy, an audio drama project from a web-platform using social media interfaces. I urge you to listen to the plays at the link below, and to take inspiration from what she and her colleagues have achieved. In these days of austerity, where our libraries are being turned into bijou inner city apartments, and arts funding is ever thinner on the ground, Sandra’s achievements are a sober reminder of what can be achieved, if we but put our mind and muscle and ingenuity to it.

I shall let Scriptography Production’s press release speak for itself, and encourage you to listen to the plays at: 
http://earcandy.scriptographyproductions.co.uk/

SCRIPTOGRAPHY PRODUCTIONS in association with Aberystwyth Arts Centre

PRESS RELEASE

03.06.2013

Aberystwyth Art’s Centre’s Writing for Performance Group celebrated its third anniversary with its most challenging project yet, an audio drama project from a web-platform using social media interfaces. The project includes short plays by thirteen writers and includes performances from over 15 performers playing over 50 characters.

In May the EarCandy project was launched at Aberystwyth Arts Centre to a packed bar who were shown the website before listening to two of the plays Duck by Debbie Moon and Lost by Branwen Davies.

Debbie Moon is the creator and writer of Wolfblood which recently won a Royal Television Society award for Best Children’s Drama. Branwen Davies has written for Sherman Cymru, Dirty Protest, Undeb Theatre Company and Sgript Cymru and is currently under commission with Living Pictures Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru.

The twelve plays were rolled out over 6 days with two plays “going live” to the website each day. All plays are available to listen to for free from the website though CD’s featuring all twelve plays are also available for purchase.

The audio dramas also include Constant Hunger of the Troll under the Bridge by Catrin Fflur Huws whose full length play about war-time codebreaker Alan Turing was premiered at Aberystwyth Arts Centre last year and was recently selected to be presented as part of the Picnic Plays readings at Theatre Clwyd’s Celtic Festival. She is currently writing the Castaway Community Theatre summer show.

Other audio dramas in the EarCandy project are Starlings by Sarah Taylor, Cursed by Sandra Bendelow, The Surge by Tracey Goddard and Julie Grady-Thomas, Rules are Rules by Dean Scott, My Mother Told Me by Rachel McAdam, Blood in Brecon by Christopher T Harris, Burn the Rich by Tony Jones, The Planning Stage by Matt Christmas and The Extension by Carmel George.

Fifteen performers played over fifty characters in the play including the Writing for Performance Group company of actors; Tom O’Malley, Sian Taylor, Milly Jackdaw, Julie McNicholls, Norma Izon, Izzy Rabey and Jim Finnis. Performances also include Robert Harper, who was in the BBC Radio Drama Company performing in over 200 radio plays including Against The Grain, Aunt Julia and The Scriptwriter, Einstein In Cromer, People Like Us, The Tree of Liberty, War & Peace, Anna Karenina, and was also a lead character, Matt in BBC Wales radio soap opera Station Road.  

All the plays were directed by Tom Wentworth who is currently working with BBC Radio Drama Wales and post-production sound was created by Audio Shorts. The project also includes several Wales based creative companies, illustrations by Boz Groden who created an illustration for each audio drama, a website especially developed by Greenweeds and filmed interviews by Trebuchet Films, whose short film Legacy has just been selected for the Cardiff Short Film Festival, of each writer talking about their play and sharing tips for writing.

Sandra Bendelow from Scriptography Productions who produced the project and is also involved as the writer of one of the audio dramas said,  “It’s a very different and fantastically ambitious project to get twelve new short audio dramas produced. The plays were all recorded at Aberystwyth Arts Centre and locations around the town including a day spent in a writers bedroom where the bedroom filled in for a fire engine, a hospital room and an underwater cave amongst other things.

The plays are all so amazingly different in style and subject and we’re very proud of this project. The group’s writing showcases have always been really well supported at Aberystwyth Arts Centre but this project is different because it allows the writers to get their work out to a much wider audience. The plays are the web so there is in fact no limit to who can hear their writing. We’ve had a fantastic response to the audio project on-line. People are following the project on-line through Facebook and Twitter and listened each day as the plays went live and now we’re getting more and more people heading to the website to listen in. In fact I’ve been completely overwhelmed by the number of people visiting the site to listen to the plays.

And it doesn’t stop here, we have more things lined up as part of the project including a week of twitter interviews with the writers and also some very special interviews with characters from the plays. We have an interview with the rubber duck from Debbie Moon’s play and also the dog in Branwen Davies play. Also there is a character in Tracey Goddard and Julie Grady-Thomas’s play The Surge who is a quite frightening character who creeps up and down a hospital corridor and never speaks and we’re going to interview her. These are all extra challenges for the writers and a way to expand the project to keep offering more to people who visit the Facebook page and follow the twitter account.

The biggest problem we have at the moment is trying to work out what we’re going to do next. This is going to be a very difficult project to follow!”

You can listen to the plays at the EarCandy website
http://earcandy.scriptographyproductions.co.uk/

On Facebook at
www.facebook.com/earcandyaudiodrama

On Twitter at
@EarCandy_plays

 

A Welsh/Japanese artistic and cultural exchange: Ami Theatre and The Llanarth Group.

Aminadab, performed by Ami Theatre Company, Tokyo.

Some years ago I co-created Told by the Wind with Joanna Shapland and Phillip Zarrilli of The Llanarth Group in Wales. Informed by Quietude and Noh Theatre, we aimed to make a chamber piece shaped and inspired by the dramaturgy of the form and Japanese aesthetics, but not reproduce them. We were fortunate to have Japanese academic and translator Mari Boyd as an artistic advisor. It was her book, The Aesthetics of Quietude, which provided us with much stimulation in making this largely silent piece.

Mari was with us in Cardiff when we premiered the performance in 2010, and consistently said how interesting it was from her perspective, as anyone who knew Noh theatre would be able to recognise elements in our work, but it was most definitely not Noh, which was our intention. It also proved to be impossible to capture on video, even more so than other live performances, so when people ask about the performance, or question what is Quietude, I usually refer them to the delicate review by Elizabeth Mahoney from The Guardian:

Stripped of most ­elements we ­associate with drama, this intense ­meditation in ­movement revels in ­stillness. It’s so still at times, you worry that ­scratching your head or crossing your legs will be audible to all. Performers Jo Shapland and Phillip ­Zarrilli, with writer Kaite O’Reilly, draw on Asian ­aesthetics, string theory and the Japanese theatre of quietude to present something that is beyond linear narrative, character and gripping plot twists.

Instead, they offer fragments of ­memory, speech and gestures, ­composed in moments that have a haunting, painterly beauty to them. A man and a woman are on stage together at all times, but never connect; he speaks a little, tugged at by the past, she remains silent, trying to form words but expressing herself physically as she shuffles, runs and dances in bare soil.

With no dialogue or ­fathomable action to follow, you try to make ­connections even though everything resists them. Is she in the memory he speaks of? Is she a character in the music he is writing, or the dance he appears to choreograph? What happens, slowly, is that those nagging questions subside and a calmer understanding emerges. It’s all very hypnotic, with repeated small movements and shards of ­sentences, and it has the astringent purity of a haiku poem, though haiku seems ­positively wordy in comparison.

The performers have a remarkable presence, even when their movement is barely perceptible. This is a ­challenging production, but oddly affecting and ­quietly cleansing. On the opening night, the audience lingered at the end, as if not wanting to head back out into the noisy, demanding world.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/feb/02/told-by-the-wind-review

Mari also enjoyed the understated quality of the work and expressed a wish to bring the work to Tokyo, and perhaps create an exchange with another director, Okamura Yojiro and his company Ami Theatre, who also make contemporary work informed by Noh.

I’m delighted to announce that such an interaction, and collaboration will take place later this year in Tokyo between Phillip Zarrilli, Artistic Director of The Llanarth Group, me, as resident dramaturg/playwright of the company, and Okamura Yojiro, Artistic Director of AMI Theatre Company, Tokyo, Japan, and members of the two companies. We shall present performances of Told by the Wind, a new piece created by Okamura Yojiro, have workshop exchanges, discussion, and initiate a collaboration between the two companies as part of a celebration of the 400th anniversary of Japan-British relations. Mari Boyd will be part of this exchange.

We have already begun our interaction through hour long skype sessions between Wales and Japan, tentatively laying down the foundations for our exchange in November 2013.

As part of our desire to share publicly our discussions of dramaturgy, form, and process, I will be blogging about our Skype sessions here in English, whilst Mari or members of Ami Theatre will be blogging in Japanese.

Essentials for the character-driven play: Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

At risk of leaping on the current Bowie bandwagon, the character-driven play is all about ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. For want of a better phrase, ‘the world of the play’ at the end must be considerably different from the beginning – otherwise why should we expect an audience to commit themselves to seeing the experience through? (And we can’t all be like Brecht, deliberately frustrating the audience so they may take action in real life, driven by his characters’ inability to forge change in their lives in his plays…)

We know in the classical Western theatrical tradition we all go on a journey – the characters as well as the audience. This can be literal, but more often it is symbolic or metaphorical. There is an event, a visitor, a letter – something new, a trigger or inciting incidence which knocks the character off her usual routine and into unknown territory. In Shakespeare these are grand, life-endangering quests – a glimpse of the love object resulting in the pursuit of romance amongst warring clans; a walking phantom prompting investigation into a mysterious death and the seeking of revenge, to outline two. Contemporary plays are often smaller in scope and more contained, but the emotional territory is still as large. Something happens – a death, a change in the pecking order at work, a child entering their teens, a diagnosis, an infidelity, a crushing doubt or suspicion, etc. There is a change in our protagonist’s life and she is pushed off onto a journey of discovery.

This journey may be a physical, but usually it is emotional and psychological, rooted still in the familiar physical world. The newness of the situation she finds herself in is important, for this enables the audience to see the character dealing with challenges and obstacles, acquiring new skills. We can observe her trying and failing and potentially succeeding in the new situation, and this makes her a valid protagonist, worthy of our attention.

She is active, taking decisions, and this live decision making, usually under pressure, reveals her character as well as defining the direction the story will take. Her actions dealing with the new situation further the plot and we can see that character is plot. A different protagonist with their individual foibles and weaknesses, strengths and experiences might react differently, and so create a different outcome. This particular character, with all her wants, objectives, tactics and decision-making drives the story. A character without motivation and concrete wants in each moment is inactive and dull. A changing dynamic and a character responding, growing, learning and therefore changing is central to keep the audience engaged and alert and the plot rolling forward. The play is alive and moving and so is the character, even if this movement is internal: changing opinion, politics, allegiance, belief system; falling in or out of love.

The character at the end of the play has changed owing to the experiences she has had, the decisions she has had to make and act on (and making no decision is still a decision, with consequences). The journey she has gone through has changed not just her, but her interactions and relationships, and ultimately had a transformative effect on her world. An audience emerges at the end of this character-driven play satisfied, and perhaps changed too in their thoughts and opinions about subjects central to what they have just seen.

Playwright vs performance writer

There’s an interesting discussion going on National Theatre Wales’s on-line community in the writers’ group re- the difference between ‘plays’ and ‘live performance’, ‘playwrights’ and ‘artists/performance writers’, and the opportunities available to each. This has prompted me to engage on that site, and now here, with what is a very old chestnut indeed…

For years I’ve been contesting the separation of ‘playwrights’ and plays from ‘performance writers/makers/artists’ and texts. At various gatherings and symposia I’ve attended over the past decade and more (usually around that other unnecessarily loaded term ‘dramaturgy’), I’ve  almost come to blows when denying and descrying what I see as an odd and artificial schism. On one memorable occasion about eight years ago, I was denied kinship with the cool crowd of live performance makers because I’d written a three act play for the Birmingham Rep’ in 2000 and was therefore a ‘playwright’ and into realism and naturalism and the fourth wall and other forms of conservatism… When I challenged this with reference to my other work deemed by critics and academics as ‘experimental’ and ‘post-dramatic’, they didn’t know where I should belong, for it seemed never the two should meet….

It seems to me definitions have generally been:

Playwright = one often working alone, primary or solo voice/vision, usually (but not always) in more established classical Western theatrical forms (naturalism/ three act structure)

Performance writer = one working perhaps collaboratively, usually in more ‘experimental’ or less conventional forms (ie, not our three act structure with the 4th wall, etc).

It seems to have been useful for some in the past to create this division, and going by the NTW site, it still is causing disruption and discord, as well as engaging and interesting debate.

It reminds me again of the debates I was involved with last year at West Yorkshire Playhouse over ‘the end of new writing’ with Lyn Gardner, David Eldridge, Suzanne Bell, Dawn Watson and Fin Kennedy. Worth having a look again, if you’re interested, and Alex Chisholm’s original essay (links, below).

As to me… I just reiterate what I wrote on the NTW site: a writer is a writer is a writer and if we can be flexible in our approach and the forms we write in, so (in my experience, at least) can the funders and commissioners….

I’m sure I’ll come back again to this subject, but meanwhile leave you with those links past and present:

http://community.nationaltheatrewales.org/group/writers
 (but you need to join the community before you can comment)

http://kaiteoreilly.wordpress.com/2012/06/15/the-end-of-new-writing/

http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/the-end-of-new-writing/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2012/may/18/new-writing-all-black-play

A New Writer Doesn’t Mean A Young Writer….

Octagenarian PLaywrights wanted: Photo from The Independent newspaper

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I’m grateful to my friend the writer Sandra Bendelow for bringing my attention to this…. The wonderful news that the Royal Court Theatre in London is seeking out ‘bright octogenarian writers.’ For a theatre so often associated with youth (I, amongst many, have benefitted from the development process attached to its well established  young writers programme), this is a major turning point indeed.

“The question was: ‘Why aren’t we giving those people a voice?’ ‘Vicky Featherstone says in an interview with the Independent, the link for which is below. ”What if you want to be a playwright in your 80′s, why can’t you be?”

Frankly, if this is what Vicky Featherstone has in store for the Court under her new directorship, things are looking up indeed…

For years I worked with Jonathan Meth and Sarah Dickenson of (now, sadly defunct) writernet - and we constantly challenged the notion that new = young. Although pretty youthful myself at the time, I was still painfully aware of the disparity in opportunity offered to the beginner performance writer, which revolved around how many years (or, rather how few) any scribbler had been on the planet. It seemed for a while that those who were rich in elastin but poor in life experience had a monopoly on any call for script development, when the hungry, eager 25 year olds (and god help the 45 plus year olds) were consigned to the scrapheap. New writing meant young in age writers. No wonder we began to introduce those clunky, worthy terms ‘young in career’, ‘emerging writers’ and so on, to try and counter the endemic ageism within the profession.

For years everyone wanted ‘the new’, which meant ‘the young’, which also seemed to mean ‘the first’.  I was in my mid-20′s when I co-won The Peggy Ramsay Award for my first London production, Yard, at the Bush. I’d been writing for many years, with several BBC radio plays broadcast, two international productions, a handful of scripts produced for young audiences, and a solo presented at the Royal Court Upstairs as part of the Young Writers Festival. Despite all this hard work and experience, in the press I was still described  as ‘new, young writer wins award with her first play.’ It was clear that my long apprenticeship and years of self-sufficiency didn’t live up to the myth, the story so often paraded in our media: the overnight success; the ‘discovery’; the untutored ingenue, the young ‘natural’…

I’m sure these stories will continue – and some of them may indeed be true. I have no problem with precocious talent, and I celebrate creativity and success whatever the age. What became so wearing, especially having been one of those ‘prodigies’ bandied about myself, was it seemed to be the only story. Young in age practitioners seemed to be the only ones wanted.

I think the monopoly of youth-orientated workshops, opportunities, and development programmes may be weakening. We have had an explosion in fee-paying courses (and not just those in higher and further education and the original writers centres like Arvon and Ty Newydd, but now the Faber Academy, and the Guardian masterclasses, etc….) and it is often those who have been around a while who can afford to develop themselves. At some workshops I gave in the South West recently, the 50 plus writer was as evident as the under 25 – which personally, I think is fabulous. For years I’ve seen new plays which sparkle with potential but are sometimes thin on content. On more than a few occasions I’ve gone away thinking ‘that playwright will be really interesting in about ten years when they’ve got something to write about.’

So what might octogenarian first time playwrights write – and in what form? I hope it’s edgy and experimental – which are not exclusive to youth (our own Caryl Churchill is, after all, 74 years young). I can’t wait.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/news/bright-octogenarian-playwrights-wanted-royal-court-seeks-new-talent-among-over-80s-8580738.html

A new writer doesn’t mean a young one…..

Octagenarian PLaywrights wanted: Photo from The Independent newspaper

. . . . . . ..

.

.

.

.

.

I’m grateful to my friend the writer Sandra Bendelow for bringing my attention to this…. The wonderful news that the Royal Court Theatre in London is seeking out ‘bright octogenarian writers.’ For a theatre so often associated with youth (I, amongst many, have benefitted from the development process attached to its well established  young writers programme), this is a major turning point indeed.

“The question was: ‘Why aren’t we giving those people a voice?’ ‘Vicky Featherstone says in an interview with the Independent, the link for which is below. ”What if you want to be a playwright in your 80′s, why can’t you be?”

Frankly, if this is what Vicky Featherstone has in store for the Court under her new directorship, things are looking up indeed…

For years I worked with Jonathan Meth and Sarah Dickenson of (now, sadly defunct) writernet - and we constantly challenged the notion that new = young. Although pretty youthful myself at the time, I was still painfully aware of the disparity in opportunity offered to the beginner performance writer, which revolved around how many years (or, rather how few) any scribbler had been on the planet. It seemed for a while that those who were rich in elastin but poor in life experience had a monopoly on any call for script development, when the hungry, eager 25 year olds (and god help the 45 plus year olds) were consigned to the scrapheap. New writing meant young in age writers. No wonder we began to introduce those clunky, worthy terms ‘young in career’, ‘emerging writers’ and so on, to try and counter the endemic ageism within the profession.

For years everyone wanted ‘the new’, which meant ‘the young’, which also seemed to mean ‘the first’.  I was in my mid-20′s when I co-won The Peggy Ramsay Award for my first London production, Yard, at the Bush. I’d been writing for many years, with several BBC radio plays broadcast, two international productions, a handful of scripts produced for young audiences, and a solo presented at the Royal Court Upstairs as part of the Young Writers Festival. Despite all this hard work and experience, in the press I was still described  as ‘new, young writer wins award with her first play.’ It was clear that my long apprenticeship and years of self-sufficiency didn’t live up to the myth, the story so often paraded in our media: the overnight success; the ‘discovery’; the untutored ingenue, the young ‘natural’…

I’m sure these stories will continue – and some of them may indeed be true. I have no problem with precocious talent, and I celebrate creativity and success whatever the age. What became so wearing, especially having been one of those ‘prodigies’ bandied about myself, was it seemed to be the only story. Young in age practitioners seemed to be the only ones wanted.

I think the monopoly of youth-orientated workshops, opportunities, and development programmes may be weakening. We have had an explosion in fee-paying courses (and not just those in higher and further education and the original writers centres like Arvon and Ty Newydd, but now the Faber Academy, and the Guardian masterclasses, etc….) and it is often those who have been around a while who can afford to develop themselves. At some workshops I gave in the South West recently, the 50 plus writer was as evident as the under 25 – which personally, I think is fabulous. For years I’ve seen new plays which sparkle with potential but are sometimes thin on content. On more than a few occasions I’ve gone away thinking ‘that playwright will be really interesting in about ten years when they’ve got something to write about.’

So what might octogenarian first time playwrights write – and in what form? I hope it’s edgy and experimental – which are not exclusive to youth (our own Caryl Churchill is, after all, 74 years young). I can’t wait.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/news/bright-octogenarian-playwrights-wanted-royal-court-seeks-new-talent-among-over-80s-8580738.html

Progressive dramaturgy….

I recently met David Lane at a workshop I was leading in ‘Alternative Dramaturgies’ at the Tobacco Factory in Bristol. We were looking at how a script ends up being the shape that it is, considering some of the other dramaturgical elements involved in making a blueprint for live performance outside dialogue, characterisation and action. My interest was in exploring the organisational principles which might inform process and the dramatic structure, including aspects such as logic, tempo rhythm, metaphor, poetic/dramatic schema, and so on…

This exploration of dramaturgy continued this morning, when David sent me an email about his involvement in Hannah Silva’s The Disappearance of Sadie Jones, currently in production at Exeter’s Bike Shed Theatre. David and Hannah were in discussion earlier this week about process and dramaturgy, and a transcription of that conversation is available on Hannah’s blog, at the link, below. David wrote:

‘Our hope is that it not only creates a useful window on the work of the dramaturg but also opens up some vital questions about how new plays are developed, why progressing our dramaturgical thinking around what a play is might be useful, and how embracing different development processes for writers might entertain a broader range of new plays being produced.’ 

I fully support this and feel wider discussion is necessary. Lyn Gardner, Suzanne Bell, Fin Kennedy, Dawn Walton, David Eldridge and myself came to similar conclusions about the necessity for more flexible developmental processes for writers in our panel discussion at West Yorkshire Playhouse’s festival last Spring. Perhaps if we keep having these discussions, and publicising the debates, change may happen…?

(I’m hopeful…We’re playwrights and dramaturgs… we’re optimistic…we know about change…)

http://hannahsilva.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/progressive-dramaturgy/