A Changing Tide

BIG IDEA SPEECH: David Edgar / The Rise and Rise of New Writing

whereiliketowrite — Thu, 17 May 2012 06:47:00 -0400

When I was three and three quarters, my parents first took me to the theatre. The play was Beauty and the Beast by Nicholas Stuart Grey, and at the first entrance of the masked and fearsome creature, I screamed the place down. Eventually, my behaviour became so disruptive that I had to be removed from the auditorium, and as, conveniently, my aunt was administrator of the theatre, I was escorted backstage to meet the now maskless beast in his dressing room, to shake his hand, to watch him put his mask on again, to shake his hand a second time, and to be taken back into the auditorium. Thus reassured, on his next entrance, I screamed the place down.

I have had good experiences in the theatre since, but none quite like that. A year later I went to the same playhouse to see the same author’s Tinder Box - a play full of sinister witches and huge dogs. But this time I was wise. I’d realised it was illusion. And I’d realised also that there was nothing in world I wanted to do more than helping to make those illusions. From the day the magic died - or more accurately, the day I realised that it was magic - I wanted to be up there with the magicians.

Between the ages of 13 and 19, however, I found my ambitions somewhat narrowed. Following a disastrous school performance as Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest - personally I blame the shoes - my mother concluded “well, it’s not going to be acting, is it, dear”. In subsequent years I realised - or was informed - that it was unlikely to be designing, directing nor stage management either. I came to writing therefore by process of elimination, it being - among other advantages, like being indoor work with no heavy lifting - the only theatrical craft which didn’t involve daily interaction with other people.

There is a third defining date in my history. I was 20, and thus in my second year at university, in 1968, that dawn in which it was bliss to be alive, but to be young and in full-time higher education was very heaven. My experience of the world wide student revolt of the late 1960s gave me a mission for my work and indeed my life which has continued, through various processes of revision, up to the present day. And when I left university, even more when I left a short career in journalism three years later, I decided that that mission was best pursued not just by writing, but by writing in the theatre.

I want to talk about why that was and in my view remains a good decision. Why commentators - and some playwrights - who say that new writing is in decline are wrong. Why - over the last 60 years - the great questions of British society have been more consistently, rigorously and durably confronted in theatre than anywhere else. Why, since the premiere of John Osborne’s groundbreaking play Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre in 1956, in wave upon wave, new theatre writing in Britain has proved (in Balzac’s phrase) the most effective secretary of the times.

So, from 1956 to the mid-1960s, the first generation of Royal Court dramatists (Osborne himself, Arnold Wesker, the early plays of Edward Bond) defined both a new kind of play (the kitchen sink drama) and a new kind of writer (the Angry Young Man). In the 1970s the revolutionary generation which had come to adulthood in the late 60s charted the disillusionment and even collapse of postwar British society. In the 1980s another generation challenged the place of women in society, history and the family. While in the 90s the upsurge of so-called In Yer Face Theatre gave voice to a generation which had grown up under the triple threat of AIDS, drugs and Margaret Thatcher. And we haven’t even got into the 21st century.

The main reason for this success is that these generations of writers found ways of addressing the great changes that occured in postwar British society in a way that spoke to the people that brought them about. But there were also some key institutional factors, without which these waves of new playwriting would not have crashed so effectively to shore.

First of all, new writing has been supported by artistic directors of major institutional theatres who could perfectly well decided to concentrate on the flashier business of directing the classics or dabbling in the avant-garde. In the 1950s, George Devine could have devoted his tenure as director of the Royal Court to continental absurdism rather than to the plays of John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and John Arden. In the 70s, the National Theatre’s Peter Hall and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Trevor Nunn didn’t have to open up their grand stages to playwrights dedicated to the destruction of bourgeois institutions. Had director Max Stafford-Clark followed his father into psychiatric medicine, he would not have launched and/or sustained the careers of Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill, Mark Ravenhill and dozens of others.

Second, theatre was able to expand massively in the 1960s and 1970s. This move was enabled by the abolition of stage censorship in the UK, in August 1968, enabling work of an overt sexual (and political) character, but also work that was topical or indeed improvised.

Third, and partly as a result, there was a great expansion of state subsidy to small-scale theatre in the late 60s, which enabled the fourth factor, the explosion of alternative theatre spaces - often in non-buildings, in clubs and pubs and basement and attics - variously dubbed the underground, the alternative and the fringe.

These new spaces allowed huge amounts of new work to be performed. But in addition to providing a outlet for writers, the fringe provided a new training ground for other theatre-makers. In the 40s and 50s, actors learnt their craft playing small parts in drawing room comedies and whodunnits in local repertory theatres. Now a generation was coming up through radical theatre companies doing new plays anatomising the collapse of capitalism. Furthermore, these actors insisted that, when they moved on to work at the great theatrical institutions, the collaborative processes they had learnt on the fringe be applied in the rehearsal rooms of the conventional theatre.

While at same time, young theatre writers sought to overcome their traditional isolation by developing all kinds of collective methods and institutions to fight for their interests and indeed to develop their work. In 1975 a number of such writers came together to form a Theatre Writers’ Union, which brought together playwrights not just to negotiate Britain’s first contractual agreements for playwrights, but to debate the aims and purposes of their craft. Now part of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, the Theatre Writers’ Union also successfully pressurized the Arts Council and other funding bodies to give new writing support and encouragement.

These writers also transmitted their experience to a new generation through self-help groups like North-West Playwrights in Manchester, New Writing North in Northumberland, the East Midlands Theatre Writing Partnership, and Stagecoach in the west midlands. The techniques developed in these self-help groups formed the basis for a huge expansion in playwriting studies in universities, with which I was involved as the founder of the first post-graduate playwriting course, at the University of Birmingham, in 1989.

Taken together, these factors created an environment in which playwrights could sustain careers in the theatre. But, in addition, new theatre writing has had a subject which has spoken to audiences who couldn’t find discussion of those matters anywhere else.

Or rather, it has had subjects. As is the way with generational change, each new wave sought both to renew and to overthrow what had gone before. For the first wave, Osborne, Wesker and in his way Harold Pinter, the big question was this: what would be the ultimate effect on British culture of the democratisation that had taken both the writers and their audiences out of the working and lower-middle-class and into the new intelligensia.

My generation, the one that followed, was enabled by the abolition of censorship and the expansion of alternative theatre to take a much more radical view of the theatre experience. Beginning in the fringe, moving on in the mid-70s on to the stages of the great institutional theatres in London, the plays of David Hare, Trevor Griffiths, Howard Brenton, Barry Keeffe, Howard Barker and me shared a number of characteristics, of which the most important were a hostility to domestic and familial settings, a determination to write plays set in present-day England, and a shared model of what had made that England what it was.

In essence, Hare’s Plenty, Brenton’s The Churchill Play and my Destiny pursued elements of a single grand narrative which very roughly went like this: Britain had been on the right side in the war against Hitler, but had squandered its moral capital afterwards. There’d been a chance after the war to create a genuine egalitarian, emancipatory socialism, but it was implemented too half-heartedly by the 1945-51 Labour government and the opporturnity was lost. The country then held a kind of party in the 50s and 60s, squandering its post-imperial riches, and in the 70s had gone into freefall political, economic, social and moral decline, at the end of which, it was assumed, final collapse would occur and “true socialism” would emerge phoenix-like from the ashes.

And of course, something new did indeed emerge at the end of the 70s, but it sure as hell wasn’t true socialism, but the resergent conservatism of Margaret Thatcher. More profound than our embarrassment, however, was a sense that had been growing through the latter 70s that the emergent social issues were not to be constrained within the iron certainties of class politics, but were to be found within the crevices of the much more fragile, porous but intriguing geology of difference. Suddenly, in the 1980s, it ceased to be compulsory for committed playwrights to be called Howard, David or John. In 1979, there were two currently-writing, nationally-known women writers in Britain (Pam Gems and Caryl Churchill). A decade later there were two or three dozen.

Incidentally, the explosion of women’s theatre writing in the 80s was a dramatic example of the importance of self-generated structures. The upsurge of women playwrights took off when major theatre companies like the Royal Court dramatically increased the number of plays by women they presented; but it wouldn’t have happened without pressure from women playwrights trying to break into the profession in the late 70s, working through the Theatre Writers’ Union and the self-help groups, forming and transforming their own organisations, and demanding that the patrician institutions open their doors.

On this reading, one could structure a kind of three-act drama which reflected the political changes which surrounded it. So, act one asked how the working class would use its new found wealth and power; act two proposed a drastic answer to that question; and act three articulated a radical politics based not on class but on race, gender and sexuality.

But even with class on the back burner, what all three shared was an assumption that the basic fault-line continued to be between a belief in cultural and political emancipation on the one hand, and a descent into disillusioned and cynical traditionalism on the other. Increasingly, however, political and cultural conservatism reemerged not as a last refuge but a first port of call. What happened with Mrs Thatcher’s election in 1979, in culture as in all spheres of life, was a power-shift from the producer to the consumer. So, like passengers, patients and parents, playgoers became “customers”, who as we know are always right. The first effect of this was on the high avant-garde - people were no longer prepared to accept that if they didn’t understand something it was their fault. Then, dominated by market demand for more of what the audience liked last time, theatre repertoires became increasingly homogenised. In 1988, if you went to the theatre in England and didn’t see The Seagull or Gaslight they gave you a small cash prize.

From 1970 to 1985, new work formed roughly 12% of the repertoire of the main houses of the regional and London repertory theatres. From 1985 to 1990 it dropped to 7%. It became de rigeur for directors to announce that they couldn’t be bothered with the triviality of the contemporary, and they certainly couldn’t possibly cope with the trauma of having a living writer in the rehearsal room. Instead, they were either doing increasingly operatic and continental versions of not always unjustly neglected European classics on dangerously raked stages, or endless productions of the 20 or so sure fire classical pops.

But the challenge didn’t just come from the Spanish Golden Age and interminable late Chekhov. Living playwrights were used to being in competition with the dead: playwrights being, after all, the only theatre professionals who can do their job perfectly adequately from six feet underground. But now they faced - in a kind of pincer movement - an increasing fashion in the small scale sector for plays that weren’t written by writers, but devised by actors. And while many companies clearly devised for financial reasons, the policy was supported by a growing intellectual challenge to the primacy of the individually-written text - a challenge that could of course call on the full weight of contemporary literary theory in its support. No wonder that, by the end of the 80s, British playwrights felt that the institutional factors that had been working in their favour in the 50s, 60s and 70s were now working against them.

Thus, for all the energy of the theatre of difference in the 1980s, the peak had clearly passed by the end of the decade. The future - if theatre had a future - seemed to lie in allegedly experimental productions of the classics, big musicals, or shows constructed by performance groups, without any written text at all.

Of course this was all wrong.

The explosion of new writing in the mid 90s which became known as in-yer-face theatre had a transformative effect on the British stage. The work of Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane, Enda Walsh, Gregory Burke, Rebecca Prichard and others was characterised by being about young people, having a cool and sheeny style, and containing explicit sex, drug-use and violence. These writers also shared a subject, addressing masculinity and its discontents as demonstrably as the plays of the early 60s addressed class and those of the 70s the failures of social democracy. Insofar as masculinity touches on economic, cultural and social issues - most particularly violence and militarism - it is a political subject. Certainly, Sarah Kane’s Blasted, in which a coercive relationship between and older man and a younger woman is transformed - metaphorically and literally - into a Balkan warzone is one example of how in-yer-face drama recharts the relationship between the personal and the political.

Critics of this reading pointed to what happened to inyerface theatre after the symbolic moment of Sarah Kane’s tragic suicide in February 1999. Yes, Ravenhill, sure, Burke (these critics said), but look at the rest. The continued dominance of plays about young people shooting up and sounding off in south London flats led to the suspicion that a theatre that sought to diagnose the crisis of masculinity was now merely a symptom of it; that a drama which sought to mourn the end of politics had biodegraded into a drama which demonstrated it.

Nonetheless. Challenging the blandness of much narrative storytelling, pushing the boundaries of representation, addressing the major social phenomenon of its time, I think in-yer-face theatre stands proudly with previous waves of new theatre writing, as a site in which the nation addressed and debated itself.

And what of this century? Well, it began in a dip. But it’s clear that - almost immediately - theatre gained a new subject and a new - well, renewed - form to address it in.

Several explanations have been put forward for the dominance of fact-based theatre over the last decade. The first is that theatre-as-journalism was literally that: in plays like - in particular - David Hare’s play about railway privatisation, The Permanent Way, theatre was doing the kind of investigative, analytical job on the contemporary world that conventional journalism was failing to do.

The second explanation is that fact based drama was merely the form of a current renewal of political theatre, that, in essence, we were back in the 1970s. One good way of mapping post 9/11 political drama is to place it on a spectrum, calibrated according to its strict fidelity to fact. On the one end, there was strict verbatim theatre, like the series of edited dramatizations of significant trials and tribunals at the Tricycle Theatre in north London. Then there were factual plays like Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo’s Tricycle play Guantanamo: Honour bound to defend freedom, based on edited interviews with prisoners, their relatives and lawyers, and the public record of statements by politicians. Further along the spectrum lies David Hare’s Stuff Happens, which joined up the dotes of the events from the 9/11 attacks through and beyond the Iraq invasion. Further out again are the satirical plays of Alistair Beaton, presenting loosely fictionalised versions of public figures in satirical treatments of subjects like spin-doctoring and royal marriages.

Many of these plays had considerable, and proper impact. Campaigns were mounted against them by the Times. The Tricycle Theatre’s edited version of the MacPherson inquiry into the metropolitan police’s failure to catch the killers of Stephen Lawrence contributed to a seachange in public opinion, and the acceptance of the concept of institutional racism.

But although powerful journalistically, verbatim drama is, theatrically, strangely bloodless. Certainly, fact-based theatre calls attention to, and thus questions, the validity and credibility of the evidence on which we base our view of the world. Unlike journalism, testimony theatre can be simultaneously reliant on and suspicious of its raw materials. But by being so, you could argue that the deliberate anti-theatricality of the Tricycle tribunals, and the self-conscious minimalism of the interview-based play, allows their makers off the hook. The point about writing fiction (even about the great issues of the day) is that you can present a thesis unencumbered by factual specifics. One advantage of verbatim theatre is that you can present factual specifics unencumbered by a thesis.

If, ultimately, fact-based drama implies a kind of abdication of the writer’s role to inhabit and to explain, it’s no surprise, perhaps, that much verbatim drama became decadently metatextual, less about the subjects it dealt with than about the business of assembling the evidence. Increasingly, verbatim theatre became not just sourced from interviews but about interviews. In Gregory Burke’s feted play about the Scottish regiment The Black Watch, Burke himself appears as a character, interviewing former squaddies. In David Hare’s play about the financial crisis, The Power of Yes, he was the central character. Dennis Kelly’s Taking Care of Baby, co-produced by Birmingham and Hampstead in 2007, fooled audiences into thinking that a fictional play about a woman accused of murdering her baby was a real documentary drama. Alecky Blythe’s National Theatre play about the Ipswich prostitute murders - London Road - set verbatim interviews to music. By drawing attention to the rhythms of often banal common speech, set against the background of events that were anything but commonplace, Blythe’s piece acknowledged the essential artifice of all dramatisation, even that of the most literally-reproduced material.

Brilliant though Kelly and Blythe’s plays were, this increasing metatextuality suggests that fact-based theatre is probably on the wane. There is certainly less of it about. And, for a number of commentators, scholars and indeed arts policy-makers, there is no doubt what will take its place. For ten years, the Arts Council has believed - and operated on the assumption - that text-based drama as a whole is on the way out, and that the future lies somewhere else entirely.

In May 2001, the Arts Council produced a policy document (The Next Stage) backed up by an unusually authoritative report by a consultancy (Peter Boyden Associates) into the roles and functions of English Regional Producing Theatres. There were highly welcome elements in the Boyden report, which justified the ,25m upgrade in subsidy to the regional theatre. But Boyden also had views on the repertoire. For him, English theatre remained dangerously wedded to a postwar age and a core theatrical canon which the public no longer knew, citing an inexorably widening “spectacle gap between subsidised theatre and sophisticated mixed-media, event based culture”.By contrast with which, “text based drama is in relative decline”. Behind both reports lay a presumption that text-based work was nostalgic and dull, while non-text based work was up-to-the-minute, trendy and popular.

As I said, traditionally, the big distinction in theatre repertoire had been between plays by dead people and new work. Now a new fault-line in theatre repertoire had been drawn, between a dusty, out-of-date text-based drama - everything from the Persians to the Black Watch, from the Bacchae to Blasted, from Electra to Enron - on the one side, and, on the other, a vibrant, popular and up-to-the-minute theatre based on devised scripts, innovative site-specific productions and physically-based performance techniques.

Confronted with this thesis, it’s no surprise that the English Arts Council reconsidered its former emphasis on new writing. In 2007, the Arts Council theatre policy statement dropped new writing from its production priorities in favour of giving “particular emphasis to experimental practice and interdisciplinary practice, circus and street arts”. After all, why would you want to give emphasis to a theatre form that’s clearly had its day?

Except that it hadn’t. Something quite extraordinary had happened to the repertoire of British theatre over the last ten years, which nobody knew about because - for that ten years - the arts council had stopped collating the information it receives from theatres about what shows they do and who comes to see them. I was involved in a piece of arts council-commissioned research - published in 2009 - which asked those questions of the 89 regularly funded theatres and companies in England, 65 of whom replied. From the 1970s to the end of the century, new writing formed a little under 20% of the repertoire of the building-based English theatre. Since 2003, that proportion had risen to over 40%. New plays sold well: during the 00s, attendances grew, and new work actually did better than the average in the final year of the survey.

But the most striking finding is that most new plays were now watched not in small studio theatres but in auditoria with more than 200 seats. On average, between 2003 and 2008, nine out of ten attendances at new plays in the responding theatres were in main houses. Beyond these theatres, the increase in new plays is even more staggering. In his definitive study of today’s British theatre (Rewriting the Nation), Alex Sierz refers to 265 plays by 141 playwrights, and estimates that there were 3,000 new plays produced in Britain during the 2000s, double the number in the previous decade.

There are many reasons for this. The main one is the continued vibrancy of British playwriting, as new waves of playwrights keep arriving. But a new generation of artistic directors - many of them women - have renewed their commitment to producing new work. There have also been institutional developments, notably the increase in the number, size and scope of literary and dramaturgical departments in theatres, the expansion in new writing agencies and the growth of playwriting studies courses at universities. It’s worth noting that one of the reasons for the expansion in new writing is that theatres are increasingly confident in commissioning playwrights to undertake tasks other than writing original plays for studio audiences; in particular, new writing now includes a considerable proportion of new adaptations, translations and plays for children. And the fact that playwrights are alive to different ways of doing things is demonstrated by the way in which the divide between performance and text-based theatre is being breached by playwrights like Bryony Lavery, Abi Morgan, Dan Rebellato and David Greig, who have worked and are working with performance companies like Sound and Fury, Frantic Assembly, Lightwork and Suspect Culture.

The increase in new writing is also an outcome and vindication of Arts Council policy, over many years (a policy that, you’ll remember, resulted in part from pressure from writers’ organisations and unions, some of whose activists are graduates of playwriting courses). The irony is obvious. For ten years, the Arts Council has believed - and operated on the assumption - that text-based based drama is inherently hostile to performance and thus in terminal decline. Like the theologians who patiently explain to Galileo that the moons of Jupiter cannot theoretically be there, they have denied the existence of their own success story. Now we’ve turned the telescope on it, they’re changing their mind.

So what are these plays? Some, as I say, are adaptations and plays for children. Many are by young writers - often Asian or Afro-Caribbean - set in semi-fictional or fictional worlds. Some of this work is loosely based on reality (Lucy Prebble’s Enron is about Enron, but a verbatim drama it ain’t). Much of it is what I call “faction”, set in worlds adjacent to the real, like Laura Wade’s recognisable but fictionalised picture of the current Conservative Party leadership when it was at Oxford University (in her 2010 play Posh at the Royal Court, about to be revived in the west end). Whether factual, factional or fictional, the main thrust of dozens and dozens of plays about the war on terror continues to be a critique of liberal interventionism. The National Theatre alone has presented no less than four new plays anatomising the baleful results of trying to impose “western values” on African countries, a subject pioneered by Steve Waters in World Music at the Donmar. It also provided the connecting membrane for the Tricycle’s 12-play cycle about 200 years of Afghan history, The Great Game.

But the sheer variety of work makes it hard to identity an exclusive theme. The plays of the 00s and the 10s range in setting from Kabul to California and from Brussels to Basra; their subjects from the NHS, education and personal debt, via celebrity culture, climate change and the army to immigration, Islam and the BNP. As Alex Sierz puts it, late 20th century British new writing was essentially Newtonian, proceeding in linear fashion on the principles of cause and effect. In the 2000s, it went quantum.

On the basis of previous waves, post-9/11 political theatre was due for a dip. Five years ago, at the height of the verbatim boom, the only question you had to ask about political theatre was whether the actors would sit on stools or chairs. Now the form is being invigorated and remade by young writers from widely diverse backgrounds who are enriching their treatment of contemporary events by returning to the complexity and depth which only invented characters can provide.

In February David Hare and Mark Ravenhill bemoaned what they see as an increasing conservatism in the new plays being presented in the British Theatre. I’m acutely aware of the problems of presenting serious straight plays in the west end (though there are several coming up, including two from the Royal Court). The cuts which kicked in on April 6th pose a dreadful risk to new writing along with everything else. But taking a slightly wider and longer view I am more optimistic. I see a new generation of writers joining the angry young men of the 50s, the post-‘68 revolutionaries of the 70s, the women playwrights of the 80s, the inyerface brat pack in the 90s and the fact-based dramatists of the 00s, finding new audiences and addressing issues that are immediate and important to them, and which were best confronted in the shared, safe space of dramatic fiction.

Twenty years ago, the National Theatre presented Keith Dewhurst’s blistering adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakhov’s satirical novel Black Snow, which contains a scene in which a young Russian playwright visits the great director Stanislavksi to discuss his script. The elderly maestro is joined by his even more elderly aunt who proceeds to inquire as to the purpose of the meeting. “Leonti Sergeyevich has brought me a play”, the director announces. “Whose play?” enquires the aunt. “Leonti Sergeyevich has written the play himself” says the director. “But why?” demands the aunt. “Aren’t there enough plays already? There are so many good plays in the world, it would 20 years to act them all. Why put yourself to all the trouble writing of a new one”? “Ah”, says the Director, “but Leonti Sergeyevich has written a modern play”. To which his aunt responds: “But we have nothing against the government”.

The Pantheon of British playwrights contains conservatives and radicals, monarchists and republicans, Christians and atheists, patriarchs and feminists. But all of them have in common that when they wrote them their plays were new, modern, and had something against the government. Long may it so remain.

IdeasTap presents... Can’t we all just get along? Examining the writer/director relationship.

whereiliketowrite — Wed, 16 May 2012 07:21:00 -0400

Continued from earlier post here.

‘What makes for a successful (challenging, robust, good) relationship between playwright and director and what makes for an unsuccessful one - why and when does it go wrong?”

DIRECTORS

“Good: when a writer wants a director to realise as fully and successfully as possible the world they have imagined, and uses each of their skill sets to achieve this.

Bad: when the writer clearly wants to just direct it themselves. Or when the writer, at the first read through, says ‘I thought you might say it like this…’”

UK: Anonymous

“Successful: The writer/director relationship is like running the three-legged race - thrilling, wobbly, hysterical, terrifying, exhausting, and hopefully with lots of people cheering you on from the stands. In seriousness, as much as the theatre is a social industry to work in, what’s important is not necessarily how much you get on with each other, but the respect you have for each other’s work. You have to push and stretch each other every day, but be sensitive and support each other as well.

Unsuccessful: The theatre is the most beautiful and terrible profession in the world - but as repayment for all the unemployment and uncertainty, we get to experience the sheer joy of the rehearsal room. “Sheer” is the key word - total transparency is a must. The work will suffer if everyone isn’t saying what they think. Don’t get precious - writers are allowed to question what you do in a rehearsal room as much as you can quibble with what they’ve put on the page.”

UK: Nadia Latif

“I know it sounds trite but mutual respect for each other’s disciplines. I’ve been fortunate enough to have had very positive experiences when working with writers, but being as collaborative as possible and remembering how each others disciplines are different is key. We are drawn to different elements within art, and by pulling all our ideas together and not being too precious in rehearsal, or too erratic, will yield the most collaborative and exciting work. I also like to have a coffee with the writer before casting or rehearsals to check that we are on the same page about

the piece. I normally open with what I think its about, ask them what compelled them to write it, and what they feel the piece is saying. If that isn’t clear to me the draft, I would suggest maybe some tweaks in the script. I also ask about what writers and directors they like.

I’m all for having a writer in the room, particularly when doing table work, but I also know that i need time with actors on my own, likewise the actors need to feel free to express themselves without the writer always being present. I take care to never undermine the writing, even when dealing with tricky (but normally fair) questions from actors.

Giving notes is the trickiest time for both sides, but presenting a united front for the actors is imperative. I like to give notes with all the actors and the writer present. After each run that the writer sees I would ask for their notes, and for any big notes i would rely them to the actor but make sure the writer is present to ensure they have an opportunity to elaborate if needs be.

Trust in each other’s talent is key. But trust is earned, I feel that when meeting the writer for the first time to discuss a script, I have to make them feel confident that I understand the piece, that I know what the writer is trying to achieve with it. Likewise by having welcomed a writer into a rehearsal room I believe they should trust you enough to have some solo time with the actors and not give notes without you around. “

UK: Kirsty Patrick Ward

“What I have to offer up may be painfully obvious, but I think it is important in most relationships that work.

I think it is important that you can be honest with each other and not be scared to explore ways of telling stories. It is very important for a writer to respect the art of acting and directing and the fact that a journey may have to be gone on in order to give their words the richness they imagined when they wrote them. Actors have to find characters and performances. It is tempting but destructive to expect it all to happen first time of asking.

Another fundamental is respect for each other as artists. The writer writes and the director directs. This is not to say that one is not allowed to share their opinion with the other when it comes to their respective area of expertise. It is important to know where the line is blurred and to be respectful, otherwise, things can get out of hand and we can stop being creative and end up defending things for the sake of it rather than working towards the main goal which should always be to create the best piece possible. There will also come a point where the director has to respect the writer’s words. Ultimately, they write it and the director has to find a way of communicating it with actors and other theatrical means.

A shared passion for the project. You may come at it from different viewpoints in terms of roles, but you should both be passionate about the story you have to tell. Otherwise it is going to be a long creative process (most likely a fruitless one!)”

UK: Bruce Guthrie

“Successful = the ability to listen and give one another the time and space needed to absorb ideas and notes - collaboratively nurturing the growth of the script.

Unsuccessful = wanting to control or change things. Being overly prescriptive about the outcome.”

UK: Pia Furtado

“I’d say as a director it’s important to really listen to the writer, ask lots of questions about the play and why they wrote it. Thoughtful, honest, open communication throughout the process is the key to a successful working relationship.”

UK: Abigail Graham

“In my experience, the relationships that work are those where both people put the time into building an actual relationship, rather than just two people working on the same script - so talking lots about the play and how/why the playwright wrote it but also about food, films, music, other theatre - genuinely getting to know each other so you have a shared vocabulary …and a base of goodwill that will sustain you through the trickier bits of the process. Relationships that don’t work… I’ve been quite lucky but I guess just that someone might be very talented and a great playwright but just not the sort of person I will enjoy working with for 6 months - which means I won’t do my best work.”

UK: Rachel Briscoe

“I’m fascinated with the question of how you remain objective when you get involved with the story and characters and are working closely with the writer, how can you retain an outside eye?”

UK: Gemma Fairlie via 280 character tweet

“Most writers feel a particular attachment to the first draft of a play. It’s when the world of the play first emerges, its characters are born. For me, the relationship with a writer is about understanding the peculiar alchemy which has come together for that writer to write that first draft at that time. Dramaturgy, and all of the conversations between a writer and director which aim to have a dramaturgical effect, should be about releasing the essence of that play.

I know that writers often feel that the play has lost its soul after dramaturgy or re-drafting. To my mind, a writer’s quest is to find that version of a play where its soul (story, character, meaning) is fully realised in its technique (structure, plotting, form etc.) And if I can help a writer, even in a very minor way, on their quest to find a draft of the play which is both blisteringly alive and technically masterful, then I’ve probably done my job and they’ve certainly done theirs.

As for the relationship with a writer in the room, I think a director should work from the assumption that the writer has a deep and personal ownership of their work. If they’re a good writer they’ll know their play really well, in all likelihood far better than one as a director can know the play (the world of the play has, after all, been living inside their head). As a director, part of my job is to work out what information from the writer is useful for the actors and also what is useful for creating the play. There’s also creativity on my part and I’ve had successes both where I’ve communicated a great deal with the writer about what we’re creating and also where the writer has left us to our devices. The key is that there is communication between director and writer about what their roles consist of.

I think the relationship between writer and director (and indeed writer and cast) works well when the writer is not only willing to give up sole ownership to their play, but actively enables a director and cast to stake their claim. At a certain point in rehearsals all the good writers I’ve known step aside (often with a grace I’m in awe of) as their characters start to be re-created and owned by the actors playing them. And so these characters cease to fully belong to the writer; after the pain and work of their birth, a playwright’s characters very quickly fly the nest.

While these might seem florid metaphors, I find it helpful the think the writer has given birth to the play. When working with their “child” it helps me respond with the right level of respect and tact. It doesn’t mean that I shy away from taking risks or making bold decisions, but with the writer (parent!) onboard, it often makes it a hell of a lot easier.”

UK: Oliver Rose

“I think a good relationship has to be based on the director’s own understanding of their role within the process. The director should not somehow be attempting to write their own play by proxy, but, if the writer is developing a play through rehearsal/workshop with them; then the director’s only concern should be to truly ask of each scene and moment created: is this serving the vision that the writer has told me they are trying to explore? If I don’t think it is, why not? Can I illuminate contradictions, or options, to the writer in how I then work with their text in rehearsal?

A sensitive openness is key. The writer’s creative act often originates in a more personal place than the director’s. One needs to take care in navigating the potential conflicts between what a writer feels they have set out to do; and what their work is actually doing.

The director is also there to serve actor and audience and it is good and legitimate to ask a writer to bear the needs of those other participants in mind.

If all the above exist, good things can happen.

Equally where an e.g more experienced writer needs none of this kind of support, then the director’s job is to be an almost invisible agent, working straightforwardly to bring together the right team for the show.

The relationship fails when a director thinks the play he is directing would be better if he had written it. It also fails when the writer does not believe their work requires any space for consideration to the actor performing their work and taking that bullet live every night.

Finally, some writers are writing therapy for themselves. Those plays tend to be easy to spot: usually the audience is intended to feel uncomplicatedly sorry for a very wronged central character, who is similar to the playwright. A director is usually doomed when working on such material.”

UK: Suba Das

WRITER/DIRECTOR

“The relationship seems to function best when the driving force is an open, collaborative spirit that listens to the needs of the play: its world; its concerns; its beauty; its rough truths. The play leads. Direct the play on the page, not the play in your head, and the playwright will see what needs work. Time and length are important, but not as important as pacing: plays are as long as they are and characters and worlds are unpredictable, unstructured and volatile. So a good process tightens without normalising; makes honest without making ‘accessible’; provokes debate without necessarily peddling answers. When plays get time to breathe and grow in workshops and drafts, they get better; slash-and-burn cutting after preview 3 can’t be good for anyone.”

UK: Prasanna Puwanarajah

“I find the relationship between a playwright and a director works best when they are the same person. If this is not possible, then the director should ideally come to the writer early and the two of them should work closely together in generating material - there will be a clear understanding of who will be responsible for what in presentational terms further down the line, but at these initial stages they should work together speaking largely the same language. If this is not possible, and there is already a script in existence before a director is attached, then ideally the director should have other skills to contribute, like also being a set designer, and perhaps the playwright if for some reason not up for taking responsibility for their work by actually directing it could still take

responsibility for it in some other way, such as by also designing the sound. The more capacities in which a director and writer are forced to engage with one another in a creative relationship, the

less hidebound, hierarchically stratified and territorial things are likely to get. At least in my experience.

In short, a good relationship between a playwright and a director is probably one where the playwright isn’t always and only a playwright and the director not always and only a director.”

UK: Alan McKendrick

“Openness and honesty always. When both parties see the play as something other than themselves, they just see “the work” and ego(s) can be put to one side.”

UK: Joe Douglas

IdeasTap presents... Can’t we all just get along? Examining the writer/director relationship.

whereiliketowrite — Wed, 16 May 2012 07:14:00 -0400

With Natalie Ibu.

What creates a bad working relationship?

Unbalanced mix of business and personal
Lack of clarity
Lack of consultation
Preciousness about job and stages
Notes as instruction rather than conversation
Lack of time
Different tastes and sensibilities
Ask wrong questions
Ideas at odds with play
Ego
Stubbornness
Lack of understanding - play or person
Presumption
Arrogance
Lack of ownership
Unable to articulate
Lack of trust
Writer too present
Lack of responsibility
Defensiveness
Preciousness
Cowardice
Concept driven
Lack of sensitivity
Want to do others job / believe know better
Imposition
Control
Suspicion
Lack

IdeasTap presents... Can’t we all just get along? Examining the writer/director relationship.

whereiliketowrite — Wed, 16 May 2012 06:51:00 -0400

With Natalie Ibu.

What’s needed for a good, successful relationship?

Trust
Passion
Closest ally
Mixture of business and personal balanced
Two sided
Mutual effort
Honesty
Openness
Free
Bold and Brave
Nurturing / Growth
Mutual servitude
Listening
Constant dialogue
Aspiring for best storytelling
Team work / mentality : us
Explorative
Provocation and acceptance
Enthusiasm
Intrigue
Shared language
Loyalty
Shared goal
Patience
Connection
Planning
Playful
Curious
Generosity
Stakes / investment
Communicating
Shared discovery
Respect
Exchange
Mutual excitement about each other and play
Illuminating
Faith
Fearless
Rigour
Shared ambition
Shared responsibility and storytelling
Appreciation / share love for vision and story
Facilitate play not egos

IdeasTap presents... Can’t we all just get along? Examining the writer/director relationship.

whereiliketowrite — Wed, 16 May 2012 06:40:00 -0400

With Natalie Ibu.

The relationship between writer and director can be difficult, with both parties struggling to retain their creative vision. But how can writers and directors work effectively together? An expert will draw from their own professional experience to host a workshop exploring how best to manage this key relationship to get the most from your production.

At around 20:38 last night, as I started to muse on the concept of ‘writer’ and ‘director’ and ‘relationship’ and ‘vision’ and ‘effective’ and ‘play’ and ‘production’ and ‘theatre’… the ‘world’ (you get the picture) I decided - ever the collaborator - that I wanted to take a poll. So, I emailed every writer and director I knew that I thought would be at their desk on a spring Tuesday evening and I asked them:

‘What makes for a successful (challenging, robust, good) relationship between playwright and director and what makes for an unsuccessful one - why and when does it go wrong?”

What follows, is a collation of responses; it is by no means exclusive but is a starting point as we meditate on how to get the best out of each other, how to get along, how to serve the play - or maybe, more specifically, the production.

PLAYWRIGHTS

“The key idea in ALL relationships is that they are built on trust. Sadly no relationship in art is purely business or personal. They are a rare mixture of both. When one his sided or heavier than the other relationships sour. Usually one would think the business minded relationships go first but you can find - and I have - that relationships between director and playwright that don’t take in to account the audience, accessibility, the numbers, also become strained. Its early on that these relationships can dissolve. I’ve had directors approach me without knowing me personally and begin telling me what to change and why. And even they might have been right I couldn’t hear them. Just because they are a director and me a writer doesn’t mean I can engage with them on so intimate a level. That’s like a man coming up to a woman telling her how she could be better dressed. Unless they know each other already, and even if she agrees with what he might say, he doesn’t have the cache to influence her. She will think him some pompous and mad man. I’ve also been the ONLY person in the relationship. Trying hard to have a director understand what I am saying and to learn what their intentions are only to be met by a chilly shoulder. This too can’t sustain. Relationships, all, must be nurtured, grown, and balanced.”

US: Tarell Alvin McCraney

“Maybe it’s ego, but you want a director to beyond ‘get’ your work, you want them to feel it’s as urgent a play, a story as you do. From when you both believe 100% in the message you’re trying to deliver and you’re on the same page there, everything else is negotiable as you can relax and trust you have the same goal. There will inevitably be bumps along the road, huge disagreements, but know that is collaboration and if you’re sacrificing they probably are too.”

UK: Rachel De-Lahay

“For me, a successful director -playwright relationship is all about honesty and being open to going to the next level in the work. Sometimes it’s even about facing something that is hard about yourself that must change, in order to achieve it in the writing. A kind of growth. It’s about being nurturing but sometimes saying or hearing hard, hard things in the most positive of ways. Just like a director is there to serve the play, I’m there in many ways to serve what jazzes the director. What are they going to be able to do that’s new and exciting for them? We’re looking to achieve a marriage of sorts.

When I first started, when relationships didn’t work I always found them to be a 50-50 situation. I found I was jumping into something too soon or didn’t have a clear idea of what I was going for in the work. I was not communicating properly or captured what I was looking to do in the work, so I’ve tried to better myself from those experiences. I have never found a director who “ruined” a play. I get sensitive about folks ever saying that because the work a director does is just as hard - so hard! I think perfecting a play in rehearsal (and I do think of it like that - it’s rare that a new play is so perfect just on paper it shouldn’t be tweaked I think) but it’s important to me that our results are always a team effort. We have to in order to really work well with the theater who has also invested their time in producing the play.

Listening to one another is key. If an actor has tried a line or section that hasn’t worked, I’ll ultimately adjust it for them. The reason why is all we’re doing is paving the way for this story to be heard and seen theatrically by an audience. To give it life. In order for us to really hear the audience’s experience and ultimately know if what we created has an impact, we have to feel we did all we could. Together. Then sharing the play with an audience becomes something else. It transforms and changes us as we experience it in the dark together! The goal for me is always to become a better playwright, and to see my productions also grow. To reach different kinds of audience as well, discover them, as they discover me, and as they discover my director, my actors, producers and team. And if it does go wrong, learn. Learn, learn, learn. I’m learning so much - and at times it’s joyous and at other times very painful - but it has made the work always better.”

USA: Crystal Skillman

“The playwright should be like fire - hungry as hell, mercurial in approach & concerned chiefly with the core white heat of the play’s progression. The director is the clay - teeth-achingly patient, inordinately faithful & yet unashamedly responsive to swells in formation. A bad playwright causes needless heat, bakes all the wrong parts of the p(l)ot & shatters the final product. A bad director drenches the inspiration, snuffs the fire & produces nothing but a sloppy mess.”

UK: Pericles Snowdon

“Trust and respect is a huge part of a successful director - playwright relationship. When a director reads and talks to you about a piece if they get it, have a vision for it and you respect them you feel you can trust what they’ll do and that makes you slightly more relaxed. It’s good if you can talk any time and you get excited listening and talking to each other. Mutual excitement about the piece helps, that makes questions, further discussion and challenges welcome.”

UK: Paula B Stanic

“What makes it successful: openness, communication, and constant dialogue. I think the relationship is at its best when the director wants to do the best they can to tell the story the writer wants to be told. (this includes pushing the writer, questioning, etc) but always with the goal of telling that story. Honesty is the best policy. Everyone feels vulnerable in the rehearsal room, but there’s no time for beating around the bush. If something doesn’t feel right in the play or production, trust in the relationship that you can say.

I think it goes wrong when either party views that the writers job ends at first rehearsal and directors job begins at rehearsal. It’s a team job through and through. People may come in at different points but you’re all there until the end.”

UK: Evan Placey

“Good: Director is an artist equal to the playwright, co-creating a piece of art, not a text-facilitor. They interrogate, antagonise and generate the work from draft 1 or earlier.Bad: They adhere to the view that a playwright for protecting, an audience for shepherding and work for staging instead of realising.”

UK: Joel Horwood via the medium of 420 character twitter DM

“I think it is up to the playwright to offer the director (and indeed the rest of the creative team) an artistic challenge or opportunity or provocation. By this I mean, when a director has to think too practically or pragmatically - because, say, the writer has stated a great deal of locations or props - they in some senses become a problem solver. And my instinct is that then the really fun questions - what IS this play? for instance - are neglected in favour of questions like when and where to stand and, when and where to exit. I think the best writer-director relationships are those where a writer openly and enthusiastically invites a director to behave as imaginatively and as boldly as they possibly can. I think it goes wrong when too much furniture needs to be moved about.”

UK: Nick Payne

“Positive: If both parties have a clear goal that is shared. They are working towards the same final production. When a director directs the play that is there, not the play they want to be there. When communication is clear and truthful. No one needs a fluffer in the rehearsal room (except the actors).

Negative: When the writer isn’t consulted on big choices at any level. When notes are seen as an instruction rather than a conversation. When there is a lack of time in both preparation and execution from either party. Planning is everything. Space should be there to play. But without clear thought it can descend into bullshit and artwank (which quite clearly should be a word).”

UK: Kenny Emson

“Successful - always good to be on the same page as the director, which can really only happen if the lines of communication are open and bullshit free. Not always easy to be honest with each other, especially in the early stages though. However be brave and express concerns from early on if you have them as they will only get worse the longer you leave it.

Unsuccessful - I’m lucky enough to say that this has only happen to me once. We had different tastes and sensibilities. we were thrown together in a rather shot gun wedding sort of way - due to the nature of the project and I knew after the first meeting that it was going to be an uphill battle. A shared sense of humour in my book is vital.”

UK: Alecky Blythe

“A successful writer/director relationship is one that is constructive towards the aim of best translating what the playwright is saying with their work and how the audience engage with the story. Directors work best with writers when they open the writers mind to possibilities and make them interrogate what their work is about. The relationship should be about a shared ambition to communicate a joint view on the world we live in today through the story they are telling. Working together to effectively communicate the story, the action, the people and the ideas contained in that. When the aim is the same and there is an aura of intrigue, open mindedness and curiosity about where the piece will end up - when both sides are not certain and they act on impulse, then that is a productive way to work.

An unsuccessful writer/ director relationship is one where the directors theatrical ideas are at a jar with the work. For example I think that there are certain versions of classic plays that are now about directors ideas about not about the stories and how they resonant socially, politically and humanly archaically with our lives today. Vice Versa when stubborn writers refuse to budge from their starting place. The creation of a play begins a long time before rehearsals, it starts with an itch and noticing something… it starts when an urge, then a story. The story is written and there is some back and forth, each side needs to open minded and genuinely not know where the play will end up to fully explore the story and the ideas within it. I think when a writer reaches an end point at the start of the process there is trouble. The BIG questions should come early on then the small ones later in the process. If the writer refuses to budge on the BIG questions at the beginning and focuses instead on ironing out in the early days I think trouble will ensue … this is of course assuming the writer and director have been working from an early stage together on the work.

Ultimately the writer and director share the responsibility for telling a story and the ideas within that story as clearly, viscerally and effectively as possible to an audience. That is their aim. Anything that stands in the way of that is not what theatre is about. The story comes first, the minute ego, pride or the intellect (ideas for ideas sake that are not directly shaping the story) stand in the way that is where problems lie too.”

UK: Luke Barnes

“A successful playwright/director relationship happens when both artists share, if not appreciate, each other’s visions for the play and a love for the story. They should also respect and understand any cultural and social specificities. It should not be an experiment. One of my most successful director relationships happened when a director agreed to helm my production because he felt a personal connection. A character in my play was ostracized (because of physical handicap) and the director, as a child, was ostracized for obesity. His sensitivity to the story insured me the play was in good hands.

The relationship can go sour when the director decides that their vision is more important than the playwrights. Recently, I had a director layer on so much gratuitous theatricality that my play was unrecognizable. I also had an experience where a director was more concerned with their career trajectory, they used my play as a calling card for their career. “

USA: Keith Josef Adkins

“I think a lot of us write in order to figure the world out, in order to try to better understand the terrible beauty of the human adventure. So I think what makes a collaboration with a director particularly good is when it’s clear that he or she is also trying to figure the world out—is more interested in figuring out what something means as opposed to figuring out what’s “right.” Does that make sense? I think it has to do with generosity—the sort of generosity that allows people to be at their most creative, the sort of generosity that produces a shared vision for a piece from which all subsequent work with actors and designers and others will flow. I think there’s a real difference between sharing and implementing a vision on the one hand and making things work or getting things “right” on the other. The one has to do with exploring how things make sense together as a whole, the other has to do with creating a false sense of certainty that choices made will be “correct,” whatever that means (see below!). But I’m not interested in correct. I’m interested in vision. A play is not a problem or a puzzle. It’s a living gesture of hopeless love. I think that the directors who feel similarly are the most fun to work and play with: there’s lots of give and take, lots of room to fail, lots of room to explore and rediscover the play.

I think lots of things can turn a collaboration into a nightmare: when a director just doesn’t understand the play, its structures, its rhythms, its music; when a director can’t own or articulate the vision for the play and, subtly at first, but more overtly in the end, actors and designers begin to turn to the writer for direction; when a writer is too often in rehearsal and other collaborators begin to rely too much on him or her and less on their own instincts and creativity; when a writer will

not take responsibility for their work, unwilling to stand up for it on the one hand or displaying an inflexible or artificial defensiveness / preciousness on the other—the former is cowardice, the later is a pose, and neither are particularly responsible or honest. If caught in time, most of these things can be effectively dealt with. But the worst thing that can happen in collaboration with a director is when the director and the playwright both fall too much in love with a concept or an idea and begin to confuse the concept with a compelling vision. That’s either the result of ego or naivety. Either way, it’s a crippling delusion which will ensure that the play serves an idea, rather than the idea illuminating the play. And you’ll only realize what’s happened much too late. Woof. When asked by a session saxophonist which was more important, ideas or prose, Kerouac said: “Ideas come a dime a dozen.” The play’s what’s important. Not an idea.”

USA: Mark Schultz

“A good director will…

Facilitate the realisation of the play the playwright has written, not the one the director would like it to be.

Never cut dialogue without asking the playwright.

Not let the playwright talk too much in a rehearsal room. It confuses those poor actors.”

UK: Hywel John

“For me the most important thing to feel while working on a play with a director is mutual respect. Ideally, the director will feel like your closest ally, and you will feel like hers/his. In this way, even when things are going wrong (which they always do) there will be a degree of trust and good humour to see you through to opening night.

The directors I’ve most enjoyed working with so far are the ones who understand that the play is precious to you, and that you feel protective towards it.

What I have come to think is good writer behaviour is that you present yourself in the rehearsal room for as long as feels right (to you and the director as agreed previously), and never question the authority of the director in front of the actors. Then when it is time for you to go, you go, and then come back towards the end and feed back in things once they’ve had time to settle and make some key choices.

And I try to remember to tell the director that I think they are doing a great job, as sometimes they are secretly just as insecure and scared as everyone else involved in putting on a play - they’re just not allowed to show it.”

UK: Penny Skinner

“For new writing I think it’s about being open to sharing ideas (quite hard for some!) and about being honest with things that aren’t working but doing so in a way that makes you both excited to try out something new instead.

When it goes right;

Having good, honest and constructive chats on a regular basis and particularly at the start of the start of the process - it’s the easiest way to understand each other and manage expectations for the whole project.

Knowing when to compromise. Biting your tongue isn’t easy but it’s sometimes necessary. Nothing worse than a passenger seat driver who goes on about what route they would have taken.

When timetables / deadlines are realistic, are communicated well in advance and are honored by both parties.

When it goes wrong;

If either of you don’t trust the other to do the thing they do well - especially if you are working together as part of a development process.

When the director make really affecting cuts or changes without consulting you.

When you stress out and verbally vomit on each other as it can destroy what you’ve spent ages building up in seconds- if you’re going to have a panic about the project don’t do it on each other, that’s what friends, family, lovers, random strangers are for!

Also, one last thought which does depend on the collaborators and the situation but if you both have the time and the will to discuss and be involved in the casting then great! There’s nothing worse than having totally different actors in mind for the same character (a play of mine was once mis-cast with an actress about 20 years older than I had written) or finding out someone’s been cast who can’t do the accent that you wrote the part in.”

UK: Hannah Rodger

“I’m a slow, dense writer and often feel out of the loop with my writerly approach/style but have to say that I’ve been fortunate with directors who have been incredibly patient and open-minded with me, giving me the time and freedom to explore my ideas and taking the time to understand where I’m coming from, what I’m trying to say, while gently helping me to shape my ideas and my work. They’ve known when to step in and when to step back in a continuing, sensitive dialogue with me, the writer - and i think that’s a smart and instinctive quality consistent in the best directors.

The worst? those who don’t take the time to understand the writer’s piece and decide far in advance how they define the work and the writer. Especially the ones who don’t create a dialogue with the writer. i’ve had this awful experience once and it was hugely regrettable. A director with zero sensitivity or understanding of the writer’s work sounds the death knell of a necessarily creative, organic collaboration. the experience made me realise how it’s essential to be open, to try to understand both sides as a writer and director, to talk, exchange ideas and shape some ideas together, sometimes giving way, sometimes meeting half way, sometimes standing one’s ground. But doing so in the safety net of an open, mutually supportive collaboration.”

UK: Satinder Cohan

‘When I first started out writing I think that I was suspicious of directors. I think I felt that they were trying to put their ideas on top of my ideas, rather than trying to figure out what I was trying to say, although quickly, and after working with a few great directors I realized that this was an amateurish fear.

Now, anytime I am working towards a production I like to know who is directing it as early as possible, I contact the director and get as much feedback as I can whilst redrafting. From then on I will be constantly sending the director drafts, and constantly expecting notes and attention. I think that I can be quite demanding but I don’t mind. I like to try and fix as much of the knucklehead stuff before rehearsals, so that the first few days rehearsal aren’t spent doing script development that could have been done during pre-production.

I have never had an unsuccessful relationship with a director, but I have at times been frustrated, mostly when I don’t feel like I have their complete undivided attention. I like very concise and pointed notes, and am prone to get a little frustrated when notes are overly vague, or general. I will expect a director to read several new drafts of the play, and continually be bringing me ideas or thoughts, this goes for in rehearsals to. I am very unprecious about my writing, and would rather a director cut or changed something that was bad, than tried to direct around it, or was afraid to say something because of my feelings or something else.

I like my directors to be as brave as I try to be as a writer. I would like directors to approach new writing with the same abstract staging and the same desire for unique concepts as they seem to approach classic texts. There is a danger of being to true to the writing, which can end in over literalised theatre. Generally speaking, I would like directors to approach my finished plays, the same way I approach my own ideas: I have an idea, and then I find as many ways as I can to make it more interesting. “

UK: Kieran Lynn

“Worst relationship with a director? Someone who didn’t know what their role was in the room (a devised piece with actors) but was also desperate to impress (the actors and the organisers of the experiment). All about ego rather than the work. Not knowing the terms of the relationship can be corrosive.

Best - Natalie Ibu. Shared enthusiasm for the work and always having each others’ back.

Also important is as much honesty as possible, but that requires trust. Which comes from loyalty and respect. And just being lucky with enough of a shared outlook on the world…”

UK: Anonymous

“The best directors are the ones who are passionate about staging the play. It seems obvious but I have encountered directors so many times who have an idea about the sort of play they want to stage and my play is the closest fit they’ve been able to find. These are awful people and should be avoided. They should write their own god damn play.

Be wary of directors who blow smoke up your arse. If they’re telling you things like ‘you’re a genius’ or ‘you’re the voice of a generation’, then they are careerists who see you and your play as a stepping stone. They do not have the play’s best interests at heart.

Always have initial meetings with directors in coffee shops or pubs and keep your schedule post- meeting clear. It’s a bit like dating. If you don’t notice where the time has gone, if you’re on the fifth coffee/pint and you’re still talking about character and plotting and language and all that good stuff, then you’re on to a winner.

If the director is consistently getting the name of one of your characters wrong, they aren’t paying the play close enough attention. (This happens quite a lot).

As a writer, I love sitting in on rehearsals. Rehearsal rooms are great. But my work is done and I want to see what the actors and director and designers bring to the play. Actors have questions. They always have questions - it’s in their nature. A director who knows what they are doing and who is confident in the play and in their knowledge of the play will always be able to answer those questions, or push the actor in the right direction to make those discoveries for themselves. An occasional nod to the writer with a ‘would you say that’s right?’ is fine. Deferring to the writer and encouraging the actors to ask the writer questions directly is not. The writer will have answers about background and about character, but these are the answers that helped them write the play. They are not the answers that will help the actors perform it. A good writer/director relationship is one where the writer knows it is not their job to give notes to the actors, and the director understands that everything the writer wanted to say is in the script. Any background or character work the writer may have that did not make it into the final script is irrelevant. Essentially this boils down to “the writer is the writer and knows what they are doing” and “the director is the director and knows what they are doing”. And that is very much a two-way street.

And rigorous debate is healthy. Very healthy. Being forced to defend your position helps to solidify your choices. If your choices are weak and poorly thought through, they will crumble. This note can apply to writers and directors both.”

UK: Tom Morton Smith

“A great director/writer relationship starts with a creative honesty and communication, a committed passion for storytelling, a trust and willingness to listen on both parts and a shared sense of adventure. The occasional kick arse joke together kind of moves things along too!

It doesn’t work when the writer is inflexible or not able to fight for what matters, when the roles of director and writer are enshrined to the point of politeness, or when the all important trust is not present throughout the process. Each party must believe in the talent of the other, even when they hit roadblocks, and stand by that belief.”

UK: Suzie Miller

“The first point is easier for me to answer because I’ve had such positive collaborations with the directors I’ve worked with. The only times I’ve felt negatively about a collaboration was when the stakes of the reading/workshop/presentation were very low. (I like to think that when I make it to Broadway, I’ll have the final say in who gets to direct the thing.)

So. A successful playwright-director collaboration, in my experience, involves the director operating on the assumption that the playwright has made every choice s/he’s made — every bit of research, every punctuation mark, the structure of the play, everything — consciously and deliberately. Even if that isn’t the case, the playwright learns a lot from a director who acts as if it is the case. Conversely, the playwright needs to trust that every choice the director makes is building the theatrical event. Every bit of direction s/he gives an actor, every design choice, every dramaturgical exegesis, is in the interesting of creating the spectacle — again, even if it’s not true. Only when we operate on that mutual trust can we then QUESTION our fellow artist’s choices. (“Here’s why I think you’ve made this choice, but what more can you tell me about it?”) And then by questioning those choices, we all make the whole thing better. In a word, collaboration.

To the second point: I know a playwright who was in a rehearsal for a play of his in which two of

the three characters are Filipino. A white actress was playing one of the Filipino characters and she asked him, “Why are these two characters Filipino?” He responded, “Well, why are you

white?” (Heh heh heh.) When we start not giving each other full credit and confidence for the choices we’ve made, that’s when an artistic collaboration gets tense and semi-functional. The actress should have asked, “What does it mean to be Filipino in America in 2012?” It might have led to a conversation in which the playwright (or director) could ask her, “Are you feeling uncertain or disingenuous in playing this part?” And then a real collaboration — a real dialogue — could happen.”

USA: Alex Lewin

“Good working relationships -

Trust, openness and honesty are key. I don’t want to work with a director that tells me a scene is “fine” when really we both know that it’s not. I like working with people that will tell me when they think something is wrong; challenge me to do better. (this works both ways)

Knowing that you both have the same overall want for the piece of work is really important - you need to make sure that you have the same vision.

In the past working with a director long before getting into a room with actors has been really useful. Just looking at the script together, so that you know that you and your director are a team and will have similar answers to actors queries (this also builds up trust).

Bravery which stems from trust. I wanted to change the final scene of my play after the second preview and the director was brave enough to support me in this decision. The play overall was so much better as a result.

Working with a director that likes you/wants you in the rehearsal room is always a good sign!

Difficult relationship -

Having different work ethics than your director. Having different priorities than your director.

Directors that do not have good communication skills (or who you don’t feel comfortable communicating with).

Directors that don’t allow you into the rehearsal room. Directors that do not ask you about cuts they wish to make. Directors with egos.

Directors who say one thing to you and something different to the actors. Directors that do not involve you in design queries.”

UK: Shireen Mula

“Good relationship between director: when you trust the director’s instincts. Especially when tell you that something isn’t working or a if a bit of writing needs reworking.

Bad relationship: when a director doesn’t listen, and is determined to put a creative stamp on the work. When the work is more about demonstrating flair than telling the story”

UK: Karis Halsall

“Good Points: You know when a playwright/director relationship is working because you have complete faith in what the other is saying in front of a cast and you don’t feel like you have to be on edge ready to unleash damage control. Every director will be different so there’s not a set template of how to become best creative buds. But listening to directors who are excited by your script and not just because it’s a meal ticket is a good place to start. We’re in an industry where we’re all struggling to get heard and seen so accepting a director’s offer just because you want your play on will not always go according to plan. Coffee, chat, go see a play with them, go see their other work. Simple things I know, but people forget them in the heat of the moment. Also a director who talks to you about your script is always a keeper. A collective musing over the script is essential for any piece of work to come to life so a director, for me, should approach the script and get their hands dirty with the playwright before getting their hands dirty again with the actors. It makes sense that they explore it with the person it came from rather than take it off under lock and key to risk going off on a tangent. Talk. Talking is very good and preferably a lot of this should be done face-to-face so you can pick up people’s idioms, tone and vernacular so later on when you transfer to phone during rehearsals you understand what the director is saying and not fretting over how they said something. Honesty, it’s key to anything.

Bad Points: You know when a playwright/director relationship is not working when you feel like you can’t be honest no matter what. Too often a playwright can get that nagging doubt that they should approach their grievances with others in mind and creep up softly and umm and arr to only end up side-stepping the actual problem. This is a slippery-slope. Playwrights seem to forget that they can speak up about issues and a director has to hear them. They may not agree with them, but any professional director will make your thoughts welcome and deal with them accordingly. Yes you

can do this because it’s best to get it out in the open than leave it to fester and manifest into complete distrust when there is no due cause for any. But when you self-censor to divert the shitstorm that could potentially happen, you’re doing no one any favours - yourself/your working relationship with the other person/the work everyone is doing. Being in an open relationship with a director is something that needs to be just as important as getting the right cast - if it doesn’t work then you can only hide it for so long before it’s too late.”

UK: Katie McCullough

“Successful director playwright relationship: as a playwright I feel that: deep good listening on both sides is key, a flexible-open mode of communication is brilliant and a mutual, fearless desire to explore and discover what the play is and how it works together. I’ve had successful collaborations with directors who understand that a new play is a new universe with its own laws (which are subsequently broken and altered often) but that the play is not equivalent to ‘our world’. Directors who mysteriously manage to unite what the text is doing and what the actor is doing in response to the text in the performance are magicians. I have had bad experiences with directors who try to impose their logic on the world of the play and ask the wrong questions of it have led to damaging processes. I had one director ask me repeatedly where a play I’d written was set when my text was clear that it was an invented world akin to, an island off Australia but no existing place. I’ve had processes go downhill when the director has felt like the play did not fit into a logic that they understood. For example, I wrote a play once where an old woman seduces a much younger man. The director disbelieved this was possible so turned the play into a farce-which it was not.”

USA: Dipika Guha

More of what the day looked like.

whereiliketowrite — Tue, 15 May 2012 12:36:27 -0400

More of what the day looked like.

Photos from A Changing Tide?

whereiliketowrite — Tue, 15 May 2012 12:32:00 -0400

Photos from A Changing Tide?

A Changing Tide? Closing Thoughts

whereiliketowrite — Thu, 10 May 2012 11:25:21 -0400

We wanted to write to thank you for joining us yesterday for the first symposium at the HighTide festival and for being such an integral part of every conversation. The day was the beginning of partnerships with you all and open, honest ones at that.

All of our speakers helped build a day of stimulating thought and each of you completed that circuit. There is of course a lot more to say and even more to do. If like us you felt overwhelmed, inspired, exhausted or stimulated then we hope the day did what it set out to do.

For us, the headline was how emerging writers and the artists who support them do look laterally to their generational peers. However in labelling this or any generation based on age, gender, ethnicity or sexuality we seem to limit these same people. We must consider the long game and yet grow up with an attempt at improving and opening up the cultural landscape.

What are your conclusions? We are keen to collect these digitally and will embrace all those online resources at our disposal to draw out more concluding statements. This is not over, there is more to dissect but that is the work of the next days, weeks, months and years. Share with us and let’s shape the next decade together.

Steven Atkinson & Rob Drummer

Aleks Sierz's blog post on A Changing Tide?

whereiliketowrite — Thu, 10 May 2012 09:17:04 -0400

Aleks Sierz's blog post on A Changing Tide?

Who's Who: Steve Harper

whereiliketowrite — Tue, 08 May 2012 11:13:36 -0400

Steve Harper is the Literary Manager of Theatre503 and has been involved with all of the Theatre503 shows for the past 5 years. He has worked as a freelance theatre director, running his own new writing company ‘Perfect Ambiguity’, worked in various capacities for Paines Plough, the National Theatre, the Young Vic and is the production consultant for JAY Records, a musical theatre record label. His directing credits include ‘For Once I Was’ by Jon Cooper at Tristan Bates Theatre, the London Premiere of Edward Bond’s ‘Have I None’, ‘Stars Fell All Night’ (503), ‘Sleeping Around’ (Jermyn St) ‘Half Life’ (Blue Elephant), ‘Random Acts Of Malice’, ‘Breakdown’, ‘Tube’, and ‘Camp’ (Union), as well as numerous readings and workshops.

Meet the Antelopes

whereiliketowrite — Wed, 02 May 2012 09:02:00 -0400

The Antelopes is an informal network of professional playwrights, at all stages of their careers, who meet every few months above a pub in London. Originally started as a one-off meeting in 2009 called by playwrights David Eldridge, Duncan Macmillan and Robert Holman, for playwrights to meet one another and share experiences of their industry, three years later the group is still meeting regularly and has around 130 members on its mailing list.

The group is open to all playwrights currently working in the UK, the only criteria being that they must make at least part of their living, however small, by writing plays for the stage. There are no membership fees and no formal structure, and the group’s opinions are as diverse and as contradictory as its membership. The group’s membership is available for consultation on any professional issues affecting playwrights. Please contact the.antelopes.group@gmail.com

Who's Who: Mellissa Flowerdew-Clarke

whereiliketowrite — Tue, 01 May 2012 07:03:00 -0400

Tell us in a sentence about Shrapnel.

Shrapnel is a play about guilt and redemption, set against the backdrop of a society scarred by violence.

Why did you decide to become a writer?

It wasn’t really a conscious decision; I think I was born a writer. Gloria Steinem summed it up perfectly when she said, “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” That’s exactly how I feel. If I didn’t have an outlet for my vivid imagination, I reckon my head would implode.

What inspired you to write this play?

I have a fascination with sexual psychology and started writing a novel a couple of years ago about paraphilia (extreme sexual perversion). To understand my key characters more, I started to explore them in monologue form. As soon as they had developed ‘voices’, I found that they started to tell their own stories, aside from the main plot of the novel. I gave them the freedom to speak, and what evolved from the rambling monologues were stories inspired by places I’ve visited, such as the battlefields in Chambois, and what was impacting society at that moment in time, predominantly the 2011 Riots. From there, I started to weave the threads together into one story…and so Shrapnel was born.

Who inspires you and how do they inform your work?

I love the juxtaposition between horror and beauty, so am inspired by things that combine the two: Nabokov’s Lolita is literary perfection to me; the Chapman brother’s sculptures; Saint-Saëns’ Dance Macabre; Philip Ridley’s apocalyptic storytelling…they all inspire me to find beauty in the horrendous.

Don’t miss readings of extracts from Shrapnel and LO both by Mellissa at the symposium.

Who's Who: Duncan Gates

whereiliketowrite — Tue, 01 May 2012 06:59:19 -0400

Duncan Gates trained on the Royal Court and West Yorkshire Playhouse Young Writer’s Programmes. His first full-length play ‘People’s Day’ opened at the Pleasance Theatre in 2008, directed by David Mercatali. His work has also been performed at the Bush Theatre (Drywrite), Arcola Theatre (Miniaturists), Theatre 503 (Rapid Write Response), Drayton Theatre (The Love Bites Plays), the Old Vic Tunnels (Old Vic New Voices/IdeasTap/We Were Here), and the Dogstar in Brixton (Blank Pages), as well various other London and regional venues. Duncan’s upcoming projects include the short films Fall/Push and Fetch and his adaptation of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, which will premier at the Zoo Southside Studio at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe

Who's Who: Caroline Jester

whereiliketowrite — Tue, 01 May 2012 06:57:00 -0400

Caroline is Dramaturg at Birmingham Repertory Theatre where new writing is developed for all three stages. She has worked with many writers at all stages of their careers, from emerging writers to writers regularly produced on international stages. She is the co author of ‘Playwriting Across the Curriculum’ (Routledge 2012) and led The REP’s award winning young writers’ programme ‘Transmissions’ for ten years. Caroline is the originator of ‘REPwrite’, an interactive playwriting tool that aids the teaching of the artform in formal education and for use with companies and artists internationally. She has developed playwriting projects in the USA, Singapore, Italy, Germany, Poland and Croatia and has taught on the Mphil in Playwriting at Birmingham University, The Arvon Foundation, Salford University and BCU.

Interview with Rob Drummer on A Changing Tide?

whereiliketowrite — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 12:10:00 -0400

Interview with Rob Drummer on A Changing Tide?:

Interview with Rob Drummer on the HighTide Festival Symposium ‘A Changing Tide?’

Who's Who: Dr Tony Fisher

whereiliketowrite — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 11:28:00 -0400

Dr Tony Fisher is the Course Leader of MA Writing for Stage and Broadcast Media at Central School of Speech & Drama.Tony Fisher teaches writing for film and stage, with a particular emphasis on narrative construction, use and application of dramatic structure and story theory. He began in fine art before studying filmmaking at the National Film and Television School and subsequently worked as a writer/director in the UK film industry. He is also a graduate of Essex University’s Department of Philosophy where he did his PhD on Martin Heidegger, looking specifically at problems of phenomenology, narrativity and historicity in Being and Time. In 2009 Tony became the programme convenor for Central’s Research Degrees. He has taught on the BA (Hons) Drama, Applied Theatre and Education course at Central as a visiting lecturer, and has a continued interest in social and political theatre and performance.

A Changing Tide? Schedule.

whereiliketowrite — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 11:19:00 -0400

A Changing Tide? Schedule.

Who's Who: Steve Waters

whereiliketowrite — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 06:38:00 -0400

Steve Waters’ theatre plays include LITTLE PLATOONS (Bush Theatre 2011); AMPHIBIANS, for Offstage Theatre Co (Bridewell Theatre 2011); THE CONTINGENCY PLAN (On the Beach and Resilience) Bush Theatre (shortlisted for 2009 John Whiting Award), subsequently adapted and broadcast by BBC radio Drama on 3; FAST LABOUR(Hampstead Theatre in association with West Yorkshire Playhouse (2008), OUT OF YOUR KNOWLEDGE, Menagerie Theatre (Pleasance Theatre, 2008 Edinburgh Festival and East Anglian tour), WORLD MUSIC (2003) Sheffield Crucible which subsequently transferred to the Donmar (2004) and THE UNTHINKABLE (2004); ENGLISH JOURNEYS (1998) and AFTER THE GODS (2002) both Hampstead Theatre; For radio LITTLE PLATOONS (BBC R4 Saturday Play); THE CONTINGENCY PLAN (120’ BBC Drama on 3). For the screen, Steve is writing a new version of THE CONTINGENCY PLAN (Cowboy Films/Film4).

Steve ran the Birmingham University’s Mphil in Playwriting (2006-11) and currently teaches Creative Writing at UEA, and is a member of British Theatre Consortium. He is the author of THE SECRET LIFE OF PLAYS (published by Nick Hern Books). His blog ‘The Secret Diary of a Playwright’ ran weekly in The Guardian.

OPEN AIR, OPEN SPACE

whereiliketowrite — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 06:14:44 -0400

At the end of the symposium day you will have the chance to participate in our Open Air, Open Space on Millennium Green which brings together the multiple strands of the day and airs them, not forcing a conclusion but providing a collaborative opportunity to conclude, for now. The agenda will be set by the people who attend, the content offered up out of the day’s musings, everything is possible, nothing needs go unrepresented. The event will be facilitated by Rob Drummer, Literary Manager at HighTide Festival Theatre but the participants choose which direction to take it.

We will keep these promises…

1. Every issue of concern to anybody has been laid upon the table.
2. All issues have been discussed to the extent that anybody cared to do that.
3. A full written record of all discussions exists and is in the hands of all participants.

We will agree…

Whoever participates are the right participants.

Whatever happens is all that can happen.

Whenever it begins will be the right time to begin
When it is over, it is over.

We will abide by…

The Law of Two Feet: If at any time you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing… use your two feet.

MORE INFORMATION HERE: http://bit.ly/Hk6PAnORGANS OF LITTLE...

whereiliketowrite — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 10:43:00 -0400

MORE INFORMATION HERE: http://bit.ly/Hk6PAn

ORGANS OF LITTLE APPARENT IMPORTANCE (HighTide Festival 2012)
by Jon McLeod

High Tide Festival 2012, May 3-13

Dramaturg - Rob Drummer

Cast - Katarina Gellin, Martin McCreadie, John Rayment

Featuring contributions from students at Halesworth Middle School

Organs now of trifling importance have probably in some cases been of high importance to an early progenitor.

Charles Darwin, Origin of Species

A personal journey for bipeds, experienced through headphones whilst moving through the town of Halesworth. This new play immerses you in a character’s trail of thoughts as they walk the streets of their hometown, with locations triggering flashbacks to key moments and thoughts in their life. Allow yourself to follow the voices and sounds as a new story unfolds.

Organs of Little Apparent Importance is an exciting major new work for HighTide that invites its audience to journey through an imagined Halesworth. How do we evolve, how do places change and what shapes our perception of the here, of the now?

Sound designer, composer and theatre maker Jon McLeod is one of the most exciting sound artists working in the UK. This piece was created with contributions from students at Halesworth Middle School.

Price: Free

Booking: This is a rolling performance with headphone collection from The Cut Box Office between 12-7pm. Please speak to The Cut Box Office to arrange your slot.

Running time: 60 mins (approx)