20 Questions…. Rabab Ghazoul.

Rabab Ghazoul

Rabab Ghazoul is a visual artist whose practice draws upon a range of media and processes to explore our negotiations and constructions of the political. Part social observation, part investigation into the realm of public narrative, her work has seen her referencing or re-staging existing ‘texts’ – from news media footage to an existing art work – by way of exploring the coerced and de-stabilised nature of our affiliations. Born and part raised in the Middle East, her experience of dual cultures informs an ongoing interest in belonging and identity, but often at their point of fragmentation or dissolution. In this sense her chosen ‘text’ is less the culture of home, and more the ever-present effects – or ‘home’ – of late capitalist culture, through which we continue to rehearse our prescribed and ritualistic movements. Born in Mosul, Iraq, she has lived and worked in Cardiff for the last 20 years.

I’m always excited to come upon new opportunities and competitions for writers of many disciplines, so here, with an approaching deadline of 30th June 2013 are the Lightship International Literary Prizes. I’m not familiar with the competitions, but am impressed by the patron, Hilary Mantel, and some of the judges, who include Tessa Hadley and M.J. Hyland, two personal favourites. The competitions are across a wide spectrum of form, from the first act of a theatre script, to poetry, flash fiction, memoir and short story, amongst others.

Lightship International Short Story Prize

Prize: £1,000
10 short-listed stories will be published in Lightship Anthology 3 (Nov 2013)

Judge: Tessa Hadley

Word limit: 5000

Deadline: Midnight GMT 30/6/13

Entry Fee: £12

Lightship International First Chapter Prize

Prize: Professional Mentoring / Possible Publication

Judges: M.J. Hyland, David Miller (RCW), Alessandro Gallenzi (Alma Books)

Word limit: 5400 (including one page synopsis)

Deadline: Midnight GMT 30/6/13

Entry Fee: £16

Lightship International Flash Fiction Prize

Prize: £500
10 short-listed flash fictions will be published in Lightship Anthology 3 (Nov 2013)

Judge: Etgar Keret

Word limit: 1500

Deadline: Midnight GMT 30/6/13

Entry Fee: £10

Lightship International Poetry Prize

Prize: £1000
10 short-listed poems will be published in Lightship Anthology 3 (Nov 2013)

Judge: David Wheatley

Word limit: 200

Deadline: Midnight GMT 30/6/13

Entry Fee: £8

Lightship International One Page Story Prize

Prize: £250
10 short-listed flash fictions will be published in Lightship Anthology 3 (Nov 2013)

Judge: Calum Kerr

Word limit: 300

Deadline: Midnight GMT 30/6/13

Entry Fee: £8

Lightship International Short Memoir Prize

Prize: £1000
10 short-listed short memoirs will be published in Lightship Anthology 3 (Nov 2013)

Judge: Rachel Cusk

Word limit: 5000

Deadline: Midnight GMT 30/6/13

Entry Fee: £12

Lightship International First Act Prize

Prize: Professional Mentoring / Possible Production of Full Length Play at The Cockpit Theatre, London

Judges: Anthony McCarten, Micheline Steinberg, David Whybrow (Cockpit
 Theatre Director)

Word limit: 6000 (including one page synopsis)

Deadline: Midnight GMT 30/9/13

Entry Fee: £18

For full details of all competitions please go to: www.lightshippublishing.co.uk

If you have any queries please email Lightship Publishing at: admin@lightshippublishing.co.uk

This blog initially was about documenting various processes for a playwright/dramaturg/co-creator, working towards production  (these posts are still available in this blog’s archive). This is still a focus, for I’m interested in exploring the breadth and diversity of the skills a writer may need within any creative process – and it is something I will document again, when in production.

I think there is a myth that we do just one thing – write – (as though that weren’t demanding and challenging enough!). I’m curious about the other elements required for a writing life – the other tools we may need to survive, which include everything from accountancy skills and being able to write outstanding grant applications, to the social skills required for collaboration in the rehearsal room. This is an area I intend to blog about in the future. But I am even more curious with how other artists do it – how do we survive a bad review, little success, disappointing sales, and that doubting dark night of the soul..? This is one reason why I started ’20 Questions…’ to learn from other artists, writers, actors, sculptors and those engaged professionally with creativity how and why we continue to do this. And to be reminded of the inherent value – even necessity – of this compulsion.

And so this blog has continued to evolve, bringing in other voices and opinions rather than being focused solely on my own process when in the doing (although I will for sure do this again, when the opportunity arises). I also have been using it to highlight certain political debates (‘cripping up’, the use of black face in German theatres, ageism and sexism within the profession, etc), and also highlighting certain opportunities and competitions for writers within the UK as well as internationally. When I began this blog, I always wanted to create something that would be useful – and hope this will be the experience for those who trouble to read it.

In the spirit of this, I want to draw attention to the approaching deadline on 31st May 2013 of The Bridport Prize, whose mission is ‘to encourage emerging writers and promote literary excellence through its competition structure.’ Well established, it offers £15,000 in prizes for poetry, short stories, and flash fiction, with judges including Wendy Cope and Michele Roberts. For details of the competitions, please go to: http://www.bridportprize.org.uk

As to me…. so far 2013 has been primarily about completing one large long-standing prose project, delivering the first draft of a theatre commission and initiating new projects in media drama and live performance. Some are my own projects as a solo writer, but others are international collaborations with the Llanarth Group: an Irish/Welsh/Singapore-Chinese/American/South Korean co-creation in the Summer and the other a cultural exchange in Japan late in the year. Meanwhile I will be continuing my fellowship at Freie Universitat’s international research centre ‘Interweaving Performance Cultures’ in Berlin, reflecting on the relationship between ‘mainstream’ and disability cultures.

As part of this, I will be presenting at dance conference  TanzKongress in Dusseldorf on Saturday 8th June: ‘Border Control: Framing the Atypical Body. “You say radical, I say conservative, you say inclusive, I say subversive.”’

The schedule is overwhelming and looks incredibly exciting. For further details go to:

http://www.tanzkongress.de/en/programme/congress-programme.html?date=2013-06-08#event-76-0

Gabriel Gbadamosi

Gabriel Gbadamosi is a poet, playwright and essayist.  His London novel, Vauxhall, won the 2011 Tibor Jones Pageturner Prize.  He was AHRC Creative and Performing Arts Fellow in European and African performance at the Pinter Centre, Goldsmiths, and a Judith E. Wilson Fellow for creative writing at Cambridge University.  Book collaborations with visual artists include Coffee Incognito with Rod Hill, Sun-Shine, Moonshine with Conroy/Sanderson, and The Second Life of Shells with Mandy Bonnell.  Plays include Shango (DNA, Amsterdam), Hotel Orpheu (Schaubühne, Berlin) and for radio The Long, Hot Summer of ’76 (BBC Radio 3) which won the first Richard Imison Award.  A sample essay on African art, An Informal History of the Male Nude, can be found online at BBC Radio 3.

What first drew you to your particular practice (art/acting/writing, etc)?

I became a writer in primary school.  My ‘daily diary’ became a way to speak out to my parents and be heard among my brothers and sisters.  They often spoke of it.  But I became a poet as a teenager.  And a playwright in my twenties.  An essayist in my thirties.  And yes, a novelist in my forties.  Now I’m in my fifties, I no longer keep a diary.

What was your big breakthrough?

 That hasn’t happened.  But I once wrote a poem at the speed in which I could speak it.  That felt like a breakthrough.

 What is the most challenging aspect of your work/process?

 Loneliness.  Self-censorship.  Loss of confidence.  The un-hinging of my social self.

 Is there a piece of art, or a book, or a play, which changed you?

 No.  Love has changed me; death on the road (it took me 10 years to recover from that).  But Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra changed the way I feel, and King Lear the way I think.

 What’s more important: form or content?

 I was always told they were the same thing.

 How do you know when a project is finished?

 When it won’t let you back in.

Do you read your reviews?

 I had a friend who started with writing a review, and then wrote the play, and then directed it, and then published the review (under another pseudonym). How good is that?

 What advice would you give a young writer/practitioner?

 Do something else.  And if you can’t, do your best.

 What work of art would you most like to own?

 Apart from one I could sell for a lot of money, something from my son or daughter.

 What’s the biggest myth about writing/the creative process?

 That only talented or specialized or professional people can do it.

 What are you working on now?

 An online walking tour of Vauxhall, where I grew up, where my novel is set, where the pleasure gardens were from the 17^th to the 19^th century and the security state is now (MI6, etc).

 What is the piece of art/novel/collection/ you wish you’d created?

 Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater.

 What do you wish you’d known when you were starting out?

 That life is short and love is mortal.

 What’s your greatest ambition?

 To write a great poem.

 How do you tackle lack of confidence, doubt, or insecurity?

 I don’t so much tackle these things as sustain myself despite them.

 What is the worst thing anyone said/wrote about your work?

 Stop writing.

And the best thing?

 Carry on writing, but you’ll never write anything which could be better than this.

 If you were to create a conceit or metaphor about the creative process, what would it be?

 Banging a nail in the tooth of death.

 What is your philosophy or life motto?

 I don’t have one.

 What is the single most important thing you’ve learned about the creative life?

You can hand it on.

 What is the answer to the question I should have – but didn’t – ask?

Mine’s a pint of cider.

Vauxhall by Gabriel Gbadamosi. Published by Telegram

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Only a poet could have written Vauxhall … clean, swift yet with flashes of lightning 
- Bonnie Greer

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Gabriel Gbadamosi reads an extract from, and talks about his novel Vauxhall

http://vimeo.com/63403887

Further information on Gabriel and his novel can be found at:

http://gabrielgbadamosi.com/about-vauxhall/

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vauxhall-Gabriel-Gbadamosi/dp/1846591465/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368027668&sr=1-1

Reviews for the book:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2325487/DEBUT-FICTION.html

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

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

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The competition is for unpublished poems of any length and in any style by women poets.

1st Prize: £2,000

Plus two optional extras: A week’s writing retreat at Cove Park* and a mentoring session with the editor of Poetry Review*

2nd Prize: £400 


3rd Prize: £200

17 runners up win £25 each. All winning poems will be published in issue 59 of Mslexia, published in September 2013.

Closing date: 17 June 2013

JUDGE: KATHLEEN JAMIE

‘I’ll be looking for a poem that has energy (which is not the same as noise). I’ll be seeking a poem which shows the tug and pull of language, written by a poet who has listened to what the poem wants to be.’

For further information and to enter, go to:

http://www.mslexia.co.uk/shop/pcomp_enter.php

20 Questions…. Philip Casey.

Philip Casey. Photo by Karina Casey

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Philip Casey has published four collections of poetry, including Dialogue in Fading Light (New Island Books, 2005), and three novels, The Fabulists (Lilliput 1994), The Water Star (Picador, 1999) and The Fisher Child (Picador, 2001). He’s a member of Aosdána and lives in Dublin.

http://aosdana.artscouncil.ie/

What first drew you to writing?

I  told stories from a young age – mostly to my brothers on the higher branches of macrocarpa trees in Wexford. When I was in hospital in my teens, my father gave me a guitar, so I started writing songs to the three chord trick.

Growing up in rural Ireland in the sixties, I hadn’t come across any poetry other than ballads, but one night I heard a poetry programme on radio and said to myself: I can do that. Then a few years later an arts centre – probably the first in Ireland – opened in my local town Gorey, thanks to the artist Paul Funge. We had a magazine called The Gorey Detail, edited with fun as the prime criterion by James Liddy.

The Fabulists

When I came back from Spain in 1977, I was a round peg in a square hole, so about two years later I decided to do what I’d always wanted to do, which was to write poems. I’ve  never abandoned verse, but after trying plays, I turned to novels when a couple of characters came to me and I stopped to listen. That was The Fabulists.

What was your big breakthrough?

I can hear the sceptical laughter! No big breakthroughs, I think.  Let’s see. Finishing my second, long novel The Water Star felt like a breakthrough, and when it was accepted by Picador that felt like a breakthrough. I’d always loved Picador books, and it had been a vague daydream which I’d never taken seriously. Then for some reason I said out loud what my daydream was,  and thanks to my agent Lisa Eveleigh, it happened.

What is the most challenging aspect of your work/process?

In prose, it’s summoning up the mental and physical energy to keep myself at the heart of the story.

In poetry the challenge is to forget myself, everything,  for that fleeting moment when the poem happens – Keat’s  Negative Capability, I suppose.  I usually fail that one miserably. The last batch of poems came when I was ill a few years back. 

Is there a piece of art, or a book, or a play, which changed you?

When I was in the aforementioned hospital, aged sixteen, I voraciously read Agatha Christie. Then the boy in the bed next to me contemptuously handed me Sean O’Casey’s Dublin trilogy (Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, and The Plough and the Stars). Here were real characters and I was changed, utterly. I haven’t been able to read horror, detective or science fiction since – not that I look down on such, and I like the latter two genres on film, but that really did change me. Then about a year after I’d read O’Casey I read Ulysses… Boom!

What’s more important: form or content?

I don’t like to think about these things.   I think form happens as the story or poem reveals itself, and is polished later.

How do you know when a project is finished?

Do you ever? Wasn’t it Leonardo da Vinci who said that art is never finished, only abandoned? Of course he was a genius.  I think there is a sense of closure. It falls quiet.

Do you read your reviews?

Yes. If it’s a reviewer’s ego trip, and there’s a lot of it about, I just shrug  – it says more about the reviewer than the work. But  I can always learn from good criticism and I always hope for it.  The best I ever got was from the poet and novelist Brian Lynch http://www.brianlynch.org  when he reviewed my first book of verse. It’s a long time ago now but from memory: ‘Casey places too much emphasis on Kavanagh’s dictum of a true note on a slack string.’

The Water Star

What advice would you give a young writer?

I feel a bewildered tenderness towards young writers. To get a book published is an enormous achievement, but then out of the thousands of books published every year, only a  few come to the surface. Apart from read, read, read, which I presume is obvious, I would say learn the difference between the good critic and the windbag, and listen to the good critic.  Be wary of your darling sentences. On the other hand, if you have a formula and a business plan then congratulations, it’s probably a breeze, nine to five.

What work of art would you most like to own?

I can’t get enough of art, as it happens. If pressed, Goya  is a particular favourite, somehow. Anything by him, but I’ve no desire to possess art other than the few works by friends which I already possess and love.

What’s the biggest myth about writing/the creative process?

I haven’t a clue what the biggest myth about it is. I’ve noticed that some people, including scientists, believe it’s an Aha! moment. An idea. As in ‘where do you get your idea for a new novel?’ That’s probably one of the myths.

What are you working on now?

I’ve been working for some years on a history of Ireland. Seeing as I’m not a trained historian, that’s pretty mad and possibly quixotic but I love it. Or rather I love it when immersed in the characters, or I’m telling the stories to friends, who in a most gratifying way, love the stories too. I don’t love it when I spend the day hunting a reference I forgot to list.

What is the piece of art/novel/collection/ you wish you’d created?

Beckett’s Come and Go,  Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Very different, I know. Or maybe not. I could go on. When I read or see or listen to something transcendent, of course I wish I’d created it. Then I’d be immortal!

What do you wish you’d known when you were starting out?

That time really does go by in the blink of an eye.  These days my email signature includes a consoling quote from Thomas Mann: ‘A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.’ Of course I still love it, despite everything, and wouldn’t consider doing anything else.

What’s your greatest ambition?

To survive long enough to finish the current work and take a long rest, preferably in the sun. Though it’s doubtful if writers ever rest. I have the gleam of a new novel in my eye.

How do you tackle lack of confidence, doubt, or insecurity?

There have been some black days and nights, that’s for sure – many, in fact. I don’t fight it anymore. I let it do its thing as it’s probably part of the creative process for people like me. And then of course there’s love. Love of the work, love of family and friends, love of women. It all comes down to love in the end. It gives me the necessary patience.

What is the worst thing anyone said/wrote about your work?

That my novel, The Fisher Child, was racist. It was in a major newspaper, to boot. The Fisher Child has race as a major theme,

The Fisher Child

and some of the characters are racist,  but I’m certain the novel isn’t. Of course I’ve forgiven the reviewer – I couldn’t move on otherwise – but  I was stunned by the injustice of it at the time.

And the best thing?

‘How does a white Irishman know my black family’s history?’ That was the opening line from an appreciative email about The Fisher Child, around the same time as the ‘racist’ review.   Also:  a wonderful note about The Fabulists from Martha Gelhorn, about three years before she died.

If you were to create a conceit or metaphor about the creative process, what would it be?

Blank.

What is your philosophy or life motto?

Rothar Mór an tSaoil. The Great Wheel of Life. I interpret that as what you give, you get back manyfold if you give without counting the cost.

That goes for life as well as the work.  Alternatively,  ‘The Trick is to Live Long Enough.’ I coined that one when gifted friends died far too early.

What is the single most important thing you’ve learned about the creative life?

To be open and vulnerable. I know it sounds earnest, and it can be a pain in the fundament at times,  but I don’t know any other way.

What is the answer to the question I should have – but didn’t – ask?

Designer

Websites

http://www.philipcasey.com

http://www.irishwriters-online.com

http://www.irishculture.ie

The Water Star and The Fisher Child are now in the kindle and iBook stores.

http://www.philipcasey.com/about-philip-casey/

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

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/