Explore Posterous

Events of Jewish interest this week in NYC include a musical review and limited screenings of several movies.

 

Double trouble? When playwrights direct | Steve Waters

via Stage: Theatre | guardian.co.uk by Steve Waters on 10/09/09

As a writer, I'm used to handing over my plays to directors and seeing what they make of them. I don't envy those who take on both jobs

What do Davids Mamet, Hare and Greig all have in common (apart from their first name)? They are all playwrights who also direct. Michael Rabb blogged last week on the merits of recent writer-director shows by Greig and Che Walker, evaluating the pros and cons of their efforts. As a playwright who has happily handed over my text to others, I'm intrigued by the risks and thrills of swapping the laptop for the director's chair.

Some playwrights are born auteurs. Anthony Neilson is a fusion of theatre visionary and writer; on the page, his texts rarely yield the theatricality they presumably carry in his head. It can be a big ask for directors to follow in the wake of Neilson's own productions.

Other playwrights become impatient with the theatre on offer and invent their own. Think of Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble, or Howard Barker's company The Wrestling School, which produces the plays of … Howard Barker. The pay-off is clear enough: the writer achieves unmediated realisation of their work. But does that work become more hermetic? Is the space for dissent and dialogue reduced by collapsing two roles into one?

I began making theatre by directing my own work. Leaving aside my theatrical incompetence, I learned a lot about production, but rather less about my own plays. Working with a good director is rather like going into analysis – however lucid you might feel to yourself, what emerges in the production of a play exceeds your intention. Your set might be definitive, your dream cast fixed, but your play in the hands of another often yields a far more surprising piece of theatre than you're capable of envisaging.

Writing for the theatre is about shaping texts robust enough for collaboration; film is quite different, largely because it draws so much of its strength from the contingent. The great Wim Wenders movie Kings of the Road was written on the hoof, open to chance, place and the actor. Plays carry a different kind of openness which takes them beyond their origin.

Writers and directors are looking in two different directions: the director towards the theatre, the writer into his or her self and out into the world. Directors need social skills that few playwrights possess. Directors need to be forensic; writers recoil from the categorical.

I'm in favour of the division of labour. There comes a point when the writer should get out of the rehearsal room, no doubt feeling that curious guilt that all delegation brings. I'd rather daydream about the next play than sweat over the lighting cues for this one.

So good luck to the writer-director but, as with all hyphenated roles, what the second term adds to the first might be a diminution of both.

• Theatre

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | 

 

 

Looking for the next bright young female playwright? | Max Stafford-Clark

via Stage: Theatre | guardian.co.uk by Max Stafford-Clark on 16/07/09

The media must stop labelling and heaping expectations on shiny new talents such as Polly Stenham and Stella Feehily. Just let them get on with the work

The recent Observer interview with Lucy Prebble is yet another piece focusing on a bright young female playwright, and labelling her as such, as if part of a group or trend. It is right that we celebrate a new generation of talented female playwrights, but the idea that this is a new phenomenon, or particularly zeitgeisty, is a media construct. It doesn't reflect the truth, and it does the writers it purports to celebrate a disservice.

It's great that Lucy Prebble is writing about serious issues – Enron, in the case of her new play – but let's not forget that Caryl Churchill was writing powerfully about the financial world back in 1987 with Serious Money. Timberlake Wertenbaker charted the venality and vigour of the art world with Three Birds Alighting On a Field in 1992, while the remarkable Andrea Dunbar matched Polly Stenham in the precocity stakes by having a play, The Arbor, on the Royal Court's main stage in 1977 at the age of merely 15.

While the newest generation of female playwrights is not following a well-beaten path, at least it's not a journey without maps. Women have led the way for some time in fusing the political with the personal, falling neither into the "art for art's sake" fallacy nor the "agitprop" fallacy, so succinctly outlined by Ferdinand Mount in the Guardian a few weeks ago. Several plays come immediately to mind: Sarah Daniels's play about pornography, Masterpieces, which follows a woman who becomes involved in that world; April De Angelis's The Positive Hour, a comedy examining gender roles through such characters as a social worker, a failed artist and a single mother who becomes a prostitute; and Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, which explored the effects of Thatcherism on feminism. That's also true of Stella Feehily's Dreams of Violence, which I'm directing at Soho theatre, posing as it does questions of personal responsibility within a dysfunctional family, set against a collapsing and irresponsible financial world.

I'm well aware that I'm trying to have it both ways: we in the theatre are eager to hoover up publicity, and yet here I am accusing journalists of irresponsibility. But the truth is, it's very hard for playwrights – male or female – to sustain a career in the theatre. Shakespeare, Shaw and David Hare, who build up a body of excellence over a lifetime, are the exception. Far more typical are the Sheridans, Farquhars, Goldsmiths or Congreves – who write two plays of originality and verve, with a cluster of lesser works.

Let's face facts: journalism has not helped sustain the careers of young female writers. A few years ago, Rebecca Pritchard and Winsome Pinnock shot across the theatrical galaxy like flaming comets. Pinnock was hailed as the first important young black female playwright, while Pritchard began her career with Essex Girls at the Royal Court's Young Writer's festival and was later talked about in the same breath as Mark Ravenhill and Philip Ridley. They are now less visible.

Other writers have spoken to me about the difficulties of living up to the hype. One national paper used to run a feature called The Next Big Thing; while I can see that it would be less appealing to arts editors, a feature called The Next Sustainable Medium-Sized Thing might well be more help. It's also worth noting the particular pressure on female writers to be sexy in a manner that simply isn't there for their male counterparts.

Rebecca Lenkiewicz's play Her Naked Skin was originally to have had a different title, while even we at the (of course highly principled) Out of Joint, suggested to Stella Feehily that Dreams of Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll might be a more appealing title than Dreams of Violence. Such pressures, I suspect, would not be quite the same for a young male playwright.

Let us celebrate youth by all means, but let's strive less for the zeitgeist, and endeavour to support writers of all ages and sexes because they happen to be talented, not because they are new.

• Theatre

 

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 |