With many young playwrights unable to afford the time or the money to write, Sofie Mason argues that for theatre to truly reflect a broad spectrum of society, it is vital for the industry to rally round and support writers.
When starting out, ‘finding the words’ is the least of a young playwright’s problems compared to finding the time and money to write.
Fin Kennedy had his first play Protection produced at Soho Theatre in 2003 and went on to win the 38 th Arts Council John Whiting Award with his second play How To Disappear Completely And Never Be Found, recently picking up the Mark Marvin Rent Subsidy Award for the same play at this year’s Empty Space Peter Brook Awards. He is adamant that the fundamental problem for any new writer is finding the time to write.
When an unpaid fringe commission came through, Kennedy’s choice was stark – he had to give up work to write and lived for 3 months off his credit cards. Fortunately, the gamble paid off and by the end of it he had a finished script to send to literary managers and artistic directors. But even after the success of his second play, it is still a matter of scraping by, often with his fee from the last play paying for the time to write the next one.
The minimum recommended fee for a full-length play averages around £6,000 but it can take about three months full-time to write a decent first draft, add on anything up to ten rewrites plus a few months in literary department reading queues and you’re easily looking at a minimum of 18-months.
When Paul Morris found his play, 35 CENTS, repeatedly rejected by producing houses, he decided to raise the money himself from friends and relatives in order to buy the space and time to develop it – space that can cost between £500 and £1,000 a week to rent. He then succeeded in securing Arts Council funding to stage the play. It was accepted this year by The Blue Elephant and they offered him support in kind – office space, help with marketing and press and a percentage of the box office. He comments “I had to become a full-time producer, marketeer and fundraiser before I could get started.”
Pericles Snowdon initially avoided traditional rental costs by looking for alternative spaces. “Thanks to a combination of Old Vic New Voices and the kindly stewards of the Old Vic Theatre, my first play began in the Old Vic Pit. The second space we found was the Proud Galleries in Camden - essentially an art gallery but it functioned very well with lighting that our company had bought with profits from the previous nights.”
Moving from one gamble to the next, Snowdon’s play Bluebeard became a box-office success at The Old Red Lion and has ended up at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York this December. “Funding seems to be more a question of getting recognition first. A good idea, constructed with passion, vision, and delivered with punch to the right person will take you farther than a sheer lump sum.”
For all three, every step is an enormous gamble with no career structure. Theatres do not offer stepping stones to nurture playwrights or hand them on from one theatre to the next. Kennedy comments “I just look at some of the kids I teach in East London and elsewhere, and some of them get very excited about playwriting and I think, what are the chances of them making it? As an audience member I want to see work from as broad a range of voices as possible, to reflect the world I live in. For me, theatre in a civilised society is an organ of democracy. And like democracy, it isn't good for theatre when access to taking part is restricted, however unintentionally.”
The beginning of an answer may lie in a radical new experiment in West Londond The Playground (www.the-playground.co.uk). The Playground is unique in addressing the early stages in a production’s development and offering to shoulder the worries about finance, space and establishing contacts. Originally a bus depot and now a 2,500 sq foot studio, The Playground is open to writers, actors, directors, lighting designers, musicians, choreographers and performers of any kind who want to play around with devised or scripted pieces.
Every year affiliated artists are invited to submit project proposals. Six are chosen for four days of funded development and then two are awarded further funding for a three week period. Industry professionals and producers are then invited to a private showing with the hope that they will offer to take the work to the next stage. Terrific Electric at the Barbican is an example of such an outcome.
The Playground itself struggles to finance its fledgling programme and survives mainly on rentals of the space. Peter Tate, the Artistic Director, is passionate about being able to afford to develop more than two projects a year. “Everyone has the need to express, to be seen. The Playground provides that platform.” He is also keen to link up with other organisations – venues, producers, theatre companies – to allow them to develop more of their own work off-site when their in-house resources limit them.
The Playground tries to lift a little of the burden but itself illustrates how systemic the problems are, requiring a huge collective effort by the whole industry to provide the time and money for playwrights to develop against better odds.
Sofie Mason is co-founder of OffWestEnd.com