I hear the Royal Court theatre is in the final stages of its search to find a successor to outgoing artistic director Vicky Featherstone, and Rufus Norris recently announced the worst kept secret in British theatre: he is leaving his post as director of the National Theatre. From the Kiln in Kilburn to Manchester’s Royal Exchange, artistic directors are on the move. This is worrying news for playwrights in the middle of writing commissions for these venues as the merry-go-round of departing and newly appointed theatre managers continues. Will the new AD like my work, they’re asking themselves, or will I be looking for another home for my new play? Will the new management make things better for writers or worse? It’s an unsettling time and all the change and imminent change has brought into sharp focus a worrying trend in the way playwrights have been treated in the past decade.
Earlier this year, I read out an anonymised letter from a playwright to the Stage newspaper’s Future of Theatre conference. It was not the first time I’d heard such a tale; indeed, it has become depressingly ubiquitous. This playwright wrote with a force and clarity that shook the room. They recounted the three years spent writing and developing their play with the encouragement of a nameless Arts Council-funded theatre, only to be met with a wall of silence for a whole calendar year.
“How does [the theatre] expect writers to continue to find the will to write,” they asked, “when there is not only little chance of production (as has always been the case to a greater or lesser extent) but also little chance of engaging a theatre in any meaningful discussion about work in which [the theatre] has already expressed an interest? In other words, being encouraged and then being ignored: being ghosted.”
The Stage ran a news story, noting that “a number of leading new-writing theatres were approached, but declined to comment”. This high-handed, never explain, never apologise attitude seemed to sum up everything that is wrong. It lit the blue touch paper. Over the following 48 hours, the theatre world’s social media was awash with tales of at best discourteous, at worst cruel and unprofessional treatment of playwrights.
It’s always been hard for an unknown writer to get a play read. It can take months to get a response to an unsolicited script. But we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about produced playwrights with serious CVs and professional profiles, who are actively encouraged, invested in and commissioned to write new plays for Arts Council-funded theatres, being messed around then ghosted.
Tim Crouch, writer of An Oak Tree and The Author, took to Twitter with a cringe-inducing tale. He concluded: “The excuse I get most often is that they’re busy. I understand this. An artistic director once told me that if they answered every email they received it would be their full-time job. I get that. But too busy for the writers? Fuck me. Something is wrong, isn’t it. I know that theatres are struggling and I feel for them. But if they can’t manage their organisation to treat the fucking writers with common courtesy, then re-organise, do less, shift priorities, change.”
“I’ve been a professional playwright for almost a decade,” says Bea Roberts, previous winner of the Theatre503 International Playwriting award for And Then Come the Nightjars and finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn prize. “And I’ve definitely reached a limit on how much I can keep pouring my heart into work – sometimes in development for years – only to be treated as utterly disposable, not even worth a meeting or an email. It’s disgusting.” Tanika Gupta, winner of the John Whiting award and the James Tait Black memorial prize, whose 2013 play The Empress will be revived by the RSC this month, reflects that “it’s humiliating after almost 30 years of writing for theatre to be treated like this. I fear for younger, brilliant playwrights who will be lost to the industry.”
Ryan Craig, author of What We Did to Weinstein and Charlotte and Theodore, has a different worry. “They are not responding to playwrights because they don’t know what’s going to offend or what’s going to work. They don’t trust themselves and they don’t trust the artists. And because the rules about what’s sanctioned keep changing, they need to keep all their options open. It’s depressing because theatres seem to have forgotten how vital they are to the cultural conversation. They have decided to follow and not to lead. Playwrights can’t do that or their plays will be hollow, ephemeral and dead.”
If you’re a talented dramatist, why would you write for theatre now if you’re going to be stuck in development hell for years, treated rudely, and paid poorly? And then, if you’re lucky, after spending three years writing the play, to be told the management hope to produce it in two years’ time – and expect you to be grateful?
TV drama is in the midst of a golden age, with billions of dollars of investment coming into the industry via broadcasters and streaming platforms such as Sky and HBO, Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney+ and more. While this startling new age has been backed by serious cash, ultimately its success belongs to the writers and writer-showrunners who have had the artistic vision to bring their brilliant dramas to our screens. And everywhere you look there are dramatists from the theatre who are having a great time in TV, such as Michaela Coel (I May Destroy You), Colin Teevan (Das Boot) and Lucy Prebble (Succession, I Hate Suzie). And, of course, you’ll be much better paid.
Advantages theatre had over TV, such as encouraging artistic freedom and getting a new play on within the year, have evaporated. As Martin McDonagh recently noted, these days it’s as quick to get a film made as to get a play on. TV executives will be at least as interested, or more interested, in your creative ideas. And here’s the clincher. The TV people have the good manners to engage with you in a timely and respectful fashion. Earlier this year, I sent an email to one of the most powerful women in the television industry and I had a personal reply the next day. She had read my script one week later. It’s hit or miss if I get an answer from an AD of a major UK theatre within a few weeks, or at all, and I’m someone who is thriving.
There’s no single management that is responsible for all this. As playwright John Donnelly (Bone and The Pass) said on Instagram: “Lots of theatres are at it. There’s an entire culture of this. Treating writers in a shitty way.” The consequences are serious – and not just because promising careers are sometimes needlessly destroyed and valuable works of art never shared with audiences. Mark Ravenhill (writer of the cult play Shopping and Fucking) ruefully revealed one shattering experience left him seeking therapy. I know of another playwright left feeling worthless and suicidal by soul-destroying treatment by a theatre.
The theatres claim the present difficulty lies with the coronavirus pandemic, as the industry shut down, creating a backlog. But, over the past decade, theatres themselves have become addicted to their own powers of curation. What the artistic director wants to say with their season has replaced backing the vision of artists. A subsidised new writing theatre may produce half a dozen or a dozen new plays a year, but, depending on scale, they may have 50 or even 100 plays under commission, in development, or in some first-look arrangement with a writer on attachment or part of a scheme. This creates choice for the managements, who often feel to us like a prevaricating Simon Cowell judging a never-ending episode of Britain’s Got Talent.
To be fair, theatres are under relentless pressure to justify government subsidy and funding from private donors, trusts and charities. Developing a diverse slate of 60 writers sounds more impressive than producing six, right? But then what? Most of these writers are strung along and their plays fall by the wayside. And as for debut authors, they get one play on and are then forever ignored, becoming “Primark playwrights”. Is this really where we want our great playwriting culture to be?
New hit plays by Jack Thorne and James Graham at the NT, arresting new works by Ryan Calais Cameron at the Royal Court and Kiln and the enticing prospect of a new Sam Holcroft at the Almeida show, even at a glance, that the new writing scene is far from in the doldrums. But behind the scenes things feel deeply precarious. Featherstone and Norris have done some good things in their time, not least in the diversification of the programming, and I wish them well. Norris in particular is to be commended for prioritising new work over the canon and for recently beginning a consultation at the NT with writers to try to address some of these problems. But a change in artistic leadership of those institutions should provide an opportunity for new thinking and the re-centring of respect for the artists who are really important in our theatre culture, across the whole theatre culture. The playwrights.
