Not all new plays spring fully formed from the consciousness of a playwright. Sometimes they need a little help along the way. In the US, there’s a kind of developmental hell, however, for writers in the theatre just as there is famously for them in the cinema and television, which sees plays being subjected to endless rounds of readings and workshops, but rarely tested in production. Max Stafford-Clark spoke to the Critics’ Circle a couple of weeks ago, and told us about JT Rogers, the author of The Overwhelming that Max has just directed at the Cottesloe. Apparently he makes his living as an academic, and has hitherto mostly seen his plays awaiting productions rather than actually receiving them. Until Tim Levy, who works in Nick Hytner’s office, read The Overwhelming, that is, gave it to Hytner to read, and suddenly he had a production.
Not all authors, though, have those kind of lucky breaks. This week saw two strikingly different approaches to the trying to address the problems of finding new plays for particular London theatres, away from the usual round of new writing theatres that specialise in them. At the National, where new plays are mostly confined to the studio Cottesloe unless they have Stoppard or Hare’s names attached to them, Hytner has long sought to break a younger generation of writers away from the studios that, of economic necessity as well as taste, they seem to be predisposed to working in, and get them to reach the broader public stage of the Olivier. But what’s interesting about David Eldridge’s Market Boy – that has 31 actors playing an even greater number of characters – is that it may be a break from the studio theatres he usually works in, but it was a different kind of studio that actually helped create it – the National’s own Studio. It was commissioned there five years ago, and has been in gestation for three years there in a series of workshops – in the programme, the playwright and his director Rufus Norris thank the “many, many actors” who participated in them between 2002 and 2005. Of course, the National has the resources – financial as well as artistic – and is funded to make this kind of investment of time, talent and money.
On the other hand, the challenges of bringing new work to the West End is about to be dramatically revealed in The Play’s the Thing, both onstage at the New Ambassadors (where performances begin on Monday) and on TV in the four-part TV series that follows the competition it was found through which begins airing on Sunday. Unlike the National’s slow developmental process, this is more of a fast track gimmick, it’s true; but there’s a serious purpose to it, too. According to an interview in today’s Guardian, producer Sonia Friedman hopes that if it achieves nothing else, “If only 25 critics watch this programme and understand the difficulty of producing in the West End, then I will have achieved something.”
As theatrical consumers – whether critics or members of the public – we are always more concerned with the ultimate product than the process; but it helps to appreciate the product better if you understand the process of manufacture. As Friedman also says, “Critics seem to think there’s something going on with West End managements; we’re exploiting subsidised theatres or being cynical. They can’t believe that maybe we just want to produce new work, too.”
