The nominees for this Sunday’s Olivier Award for Best New Play comprise three plays premiered in the last year at the National, and one at the Royal Court: while it’s a particular accomplishment that the National has managed to put itself at the centre of new writing, as well as much else, now (and a pity that the Royal Court, which styles itself as a writers’ theatre, above all, should be lagging so far behind), the eternal quest (and question) for new plays remains what opportunities there are to develop them elsewhere.
Certainly, it is a rare new play that opens directly into the West End, and while the next week will throw up one sampling – Christopher Hampton’s Embers, opening at the Duke of York’s next Wednesday – it is, not strictly speaking, entirely original, in as much as it is in fact an adaptation of a novel. (But then so is Helen Edmundson’s Olivier-nominated Coram Boy). But the week also has the Donmar premiere of Mark Ravenhill’s latest, The Cut, on Tuesday; and the fact is that, outside of the National and Court, it is the smaller studio spaces like the Donmar or Almeida (though the latter has lately been concentrating mainly on UK premieres for American plays) that the true energy of new writing lies, where they can balance new plays (when they can find them) with a classic repertoire, as the opportunities occur.
There’s a bigger crisis affecting the new writing venues, since they’re competing for the same pool of existing playwrights or seeking to make discoveries of their own new ones. Hampstead Theatre has largely lost its way since relocating to handsome new premises, though The Rubinstein Kiss – brought to them by a commercial partnership who wanted to try it out there – was better than most recent fare there. Soho Theatre is without an artistic director at all, since Abigail Morris’ abrupt departure a couple of months ago, though they have just announced plans to advertise the post.
Instead, there seems to be an ever-widening pool of “talent competitions” that are trying to plug the gap. While Sonia Friedman’s imminent The Play’s the Thing collaboration with Channel 4 is a one-off, TV-reality show attempt to follow the selection and hopefully production of a new play in the West End, there’s also an ever-growing number of prizes and awards elsewhere: according to the Sunday Times last week, Howard Panter’s Ambassador Theatre Group will “shortly announce an annual prize for a new play, which will be stage, probably, in the Trafalgar”, with Panter quoted as saying, “It will be worth tens of thousands to the winner”.
But big prizes like that, and the Evening Standard Drama Awards’ annual £30,000 prize to the winner of its Most Promising Newcomer category, create division, not collaboration. More fruitfully, new writing company Paines Plough have developed Future Perfect, a scheme to bring together a group of six writers, aged between 18 and 30, to create a supportive forum from which they can work and create opportunities for them to showcase and promote their work in professional theatre spaces. The ambition, they say, “is to establish a genuine conservatory for the hungriest and most luminous writers of a new generation”. Paines Plough are also behind a new, bi-annual £5000 commission, to be named the Rod Hall Memorial Award in honour of the late literary agent and promising the person awarded it ongoing representation by the agency that has continued, under Charlotte Mann, without him, to offer a long-term commitment to the recipient of it.
