406 posts
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Post by MrBunbury on Jan 9, 2018 12:56:10 GMT
I saw the last performance last night. Patsy Ferran is good, but it left me a bit "meh": some funny moments, other rather chilling ones, but not totally captivating for me. Anyway, it is interesting to read about Anoushka Warden's interview on the Guardian and see how autobiographical the play is. It lasted one hour and twenty minutes.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 9, 2018 13:26:35 GMT
Smashing. Patsy Ferran is usually good value and the play sounds . . . *cough cough* . . . it sounds . . . *cough cough* . . . oh I'm sorry, I seem to . . . *cough* . . . have a touch of nepotism in my throat . . . *cough cough*.
Sorry about that. As you were.
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Post by QueerTheatre on Jan 9, 2018 17:28:09 GMT
I was super interested in seeing this until all the PR came out, and the playwright was revealed to the the PR person at the Court - what could have come across as a brilliant talent curation story has instead come across very negative with smatterings of privilege and nepotism. Still,l it's a great title isn't it?
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904 posts
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Post by lonlad on Jan 9, 2018 18:09:55 GMT
Why "smatterings of privilege and nepotism?" The story happened to this woman so clearly one assumes she has a right to tell it, and one knows the selection process would have been doubly gruelling - much as was true when Alexi Kaye-Campbell was having plays done at a Royal Court run at the time by his partner, Dominic Cooke. Did you want Anoushka Warden to be a modern-day Andrea Dunbar? What's most interesting, actually, is how short the entire run is -- 12 days upstairs is nothing: GUNDOG, next up there, is running six weeks.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 9, 2018 20:20:01 GMT
Regardless of any ethical issues, it must be a bit awkward. As head of press she must have at least a professional relationship with the reviewers and she presumably has to be aware of media promotion and questions about the production even if she isn't managing it - including the reviews so that's going to be a stilted morning at work for everyone if they're bad. And where is the line between doing her day job and her freelance one if she's doing promotion for her own play that her employer is staging? I find it all more intriguing than I probably should!
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Post by Deleted on Jan 9, 2018 20:32:09 GMT
Why "smatterings of privilege and nepotism?" The story happened to this woman so clearly one assumes she has a right to tell it, and one knows the selection process would have been doubly gruelling - much as was true when Alexi Kaye-Campbell was having plays done at a Royal Court run at the time by his partner, Dominic Cooke. Did you want Anoushka Warden to be a modern-day Andrea Dunbar? What's most interesting, actually, is how short the entire run is -- 12 days upstairs is nothing: GUNDOG, next up there, is running six weeks. From the Guardian interview the selection process doesn't sound that gruelling (descriptions of hugs all round etc). It is human nature to be inclined to see work in a favourable light when the writer is known to you and well liked; you end up rooting for whatever they give you to be good. We know that it can't be a terrible play (they wouldn't have produced it if it was) but would it have been picked out if it had come out of the slush pile...we'll never know. Of course, the opposite is also true - by all accounts Edward Bond's career in this country came to an end because people didn't like working with him. He may have written masterpieces, but we'll never know. Dunbar was discovered when she submitted plays for the competition the RC used to run for school children. Her teacher encouraged her to submit on one of the rare days that she attended school. I believe the plays for that were anonymised, although it is unlikely that Dunbar would have been known to any of the RC personnel. Access is an important subject because when, as a neophyte writer, you are given the opportunity to work with the best then you are being given the opportunity to develop your craft. They may have given it such a short run because they had a "dark" slot to fill between productions and gave the writer a chance, or this might be a new initiative to showcase the work of first time writers without placing any pressure on them to sell out a full run. I would hope that the latter is the case because it would lessen the suspicion of nepotism because this would be one of a few plays being given an opportunity. |
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Post by oxfordsimon on Jan 9, 2018 21:20:59 GMT
Why "smatterings of privilege and nepotism?" The story happened to this woman so clearly one assumes she has a right to tell it, and one knows the selection process would have been doubly gruelling - much as was true when Alexi Kaye-Campbell was having plays done at a Royal Court run at the time by his partner, Dominic Cooke. Did you want Anoushka Warden to be a modern-day Andrea Dunbar? What's most interesting, actually, is how short the entire run is -- 12 days upstairs is nothing: GUNDOG, next up there, is running six weeks. Alexi Kaye-Campbell's first play was given an outing at the Finborough - admittedly only as a rehearsed reading. But it was at least programmed by a theatre. That is very different to your first play being directed by your boss in the theatre where you are in charge of press. If Warden had had a piece performed elsewhere first - even in a very adhoc way - it would have been far easier to defend the decision to stage her second at the RC |
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Post by lonlad on Jan 9, 2018 23:58:08 GMT
I fly no flag for Warden one way or the other and have yet to see her play but in fact her situation is far LESS of an issue than Campbell's -- I mean, it's not as if she is partnered with the Court's a.d., at least as far as we know! You people need to stop being so precious -- is 12 days out of a theatre's yearlong rep such an affront to your judgmental sensibilities? if so, we might as well all give up. Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears (and many others) are turning in their graves.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 10, 2018 0:08:34 GMT
What's most interesting, actually, is how short the entire run is -- 12 days upstairs is nothing It's equivalent to a three and a half week run because it plays twice-nightly. |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 10, 2018 0:15:12 GMT
And where is the line between doing her day job and her freelance one if she's doing promotion for her own play that her employer is staging? Someone else is the PR for this play. She is the PR for other productions. |
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Post by nash16 on Jan 10, 2018 0:47:10 GMT
And where is the line between doing her day job and her freelance one if she's doing promotion for her own play that her employer is staging? Someone else is the PR for this play. She is the PR for other productions. 😂😂😂 |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 10, 2018 7:39:54 GMT
And where is the line between doing her day job and her freelance one if she's doing promotion for her own play that her employer is staging? Someone else is the PR for this play. She is the PR for other productions. Yes, but she has to be involved in some way - it's her play! If she's being interviewed about it on Monday morning that's an hour of her time that the day job isn't getting... I don't have any issue with it, I'm just imagining how I'd feel if I or a colleague were in a similar position - it would be quite strange. On the other side of the coin, you could argue that the play must be really worth putting on since the RC had every excuse to say no in the basis of reputational risk so they must have wanted to give it a platform based on quality. |
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Post by mallardo on Jan 10, 2018 8:00:56 GMT
In this case it's a staff member of the theatre but how many more cases are there of good friends of production executives getting their work read and sometimes even produced because they had access to power, as it were? From my experience - not in theatre, admittedly - this is standard practice, certainly it is in Hollywood. Given the competition you use every advantage you have to get your work seen. The best way to get an agent (for writers) is to get a recommendation from a friend who is a client at that agency.
The truest show biz adage I know is... you work when your friends work.
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Post by chameleon on Jan 10, 2018 12:04:29 GMT
In this case it's a staff member of the theatre but how many more cases are there of good friends of production executives getting their work read and sometimes even produced because they had access to power, as it were? From my experience - not in theatre, admittedly - this is standard practice, certainly it is in Hollywood. Given the competition you use every advantage you have to get your work seen. The best way to get an agent (for writers) is to get a recommendation from a friend who is a client at that agency. The truest show biz adage I know is... you work when your friends work. Absolutely. As I remember, there was one season at the Court where Dominic Cooke produced a play by his domestic partner ('The Faith Machine'), & Max Stafford Clark produced a play by his domestic partner ('Bang Bang Bang'). Both were very mediocre plays - and that's maybe the issue. Where people produce plays because they're by friends (or more than friends) & not because they're good (not always deliberately; it's easy to convince oneself a mediocre play is good when domestic harmony depends on one doing so..), it's the audience that suffers. And the theatre's revenue. And, of course, the writers of better work that doesn't get staged... |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 10, 2018 13:57:17 GMT
The person who said that we are being judgemental by raising these questions might be being a tad judgemental themselves. We are entitled to raise these questions because the RC receives public funds and we are supporters of its work. I am also grateful for this forum because theatres like the RC say that their work is pushing boundaries and so often pushing boundaries means challenging the audience as silent and passive consumers of culture. Well, here we are...not so silent, and not so passive. This board is like a piece of verbatim theatre.
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Post by Snciole on Jan 10, 2018 13:59:35 GMT
Putting aside my personal issues with the Royal Court as an unsuccessful blogger aside (The questions I have about her day job are the ones I have when dealing with Royal Court press tickets system)
I do wonder why Warden didn't send this play to all the other theatres doing new work? I have no doubt this is a good piece, imagine the uproar if it wasn't, but she does have an advantage. She works closely with the people who she knows will be looking at her plays. The interesting thing about theatre marketing is that it does seem to attract those with an interest in theatre, which is a positive but there is also a risk that they may use that positive to their advantage. If we get a good play out of it, who cares but if I was a writer not getting responses I would feel put out.
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Post by samuelwhiskers on Jan 10, 2018 14:26:21 GMT
Theatre does blur those lines a lot, and having any level of insider access definitely helps. Lucy Prebble's first play was on at the Court because she wrote it during the Young Writers Programme, which at the time was first come first served. The tutors read it and according to one account physically ran to the literary office to say they'd found a brilliant new script which must be put on straight away. There's no doubt Lucy Prebble is a gifted writer and Sugar Syndrome a brilliant play, but if it had been submitted as an anonymous open submission, would it have received the same "we must rush this to the stage asap" treatment? A random first-rung reader may have not connected with it.
As for Tw*t, it's a not especially polished re-telling of what happens to be an extraordinary story. It's clearly autobiographical, and I can well believe it was written in a fortnight and not revised. Warden's Guardian interview gives the impression she wrote down her teenage memories as a form of personal therapy, without any desire to be a writer. It feels like listening to someone read their own teenage diary out loud, or watching someone tell Oprah all about their difficult childhood. It doesn't feel like a play. It works as a play despite this only because what happened to Warden is so fascinating. But lots of people have extraordinary things happen to them, which they are able to recount in a compelling way; it doesn't make them a writer. You could put any reasonably articulate person who'd experienced something similarly extreme on a stage and produce equally good theatre.
I'm not surprised Vicky asked to read it, and jumped at the chance to stage it, and it does feel like the kind of thing that should have a short showcase Upstairs. I see Warden has started beginners' writing training, which I applaud. She may or may not become a playwright and produce further plays. But her real test will come if and when she writes her first work of fiction.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 10, 2018 16:05:50 GMT
She may or may not become a playwright and produce further plays. But her real test will come if and when she writes her first work of fiction. samulewhiskers makes a very pertinent point. I say good luck to Anoushka Warden; she wrote something, gave it to someone of influence, a few more cogs turned, and now it's on at the theatre that she works in (which also happens to be one of the premier theatres for new plays in the English-speaking world). Hopefully Warden goes on to write more plays - good or bad - to follow up on this great opportunity for her; the Guardian article suggests she has been accepted on the 4Screenwriting scheme, so she is already building up a head of steam (deserved or otherwise). Writing a monologue (based on one's own diary) leaves her much uncharted ground to travel in future work, and hopefully she is not a one-hit wonder; Alexei Kaye Campbell has written several plays (some better than others obviously), so he has certainly followed-up on his chance. I'll admit that when I saw that the Royal Court had programmed a play by a first-time playwright I assumed the writer was on their Young Writers programme - such is their remit to promote writers from within. To find out that the writer worked in the PR department was a surprise, but not as much of a surprise as it would have been to discover that the Royal Court was actually going to produce an unsolicited play from a playwright it had no existing relationship with. I don't know when the last time was that such a thing happened - and that's a genuine question if someone can answer it. There was noise made about Nicola Wilson's Plaques and Tangles a couple of years ago, but she used to be Literary Manager at the Bush and also worked in the lit department at the NT, so she was essentially an insider too. |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 10, 2018 20:22:31 GMT
Read the Guardian article, Warden was fully planning to independently produce it with Amy Powell Yeates, but when she revealed to Vicky Featherstone that she'd written a play, VF insisted first on reading it and second on producing. Yeah, most of us don't work with artistic directors, Warden's very fortunate to be able to skip so many steps, but she was planning on the more traditional Edinburgh route initially.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 10, 2018 22:40:53 GMT
Read the Guardian article, Warden was fully planning to independently produce it with Amy Powell Yeates, but when she revealed to Vicky Featherstone that she'd written a play, VF insisted first on reading it and second on producing. Yeah, most of us don't work with artistic directors, Warden's very fortunate to be able to skip so many steps, but she was planning on the more traditional Edinburgh route initially. But surely the issue under discussion has nothing to do with Warden and her work but with the RC and its processes. Surely VF should have allowed the young writer to produce her play in Edinburgh where I presume VF would have seen it. Then she could have snapped it up for production and that would have made a brilliant (and non nepotistic) story. |
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Post by Jon on Jan 11, 2018 1:38:47 GMT
Will Mortimer, the Literary Manager at Hampstead Theatre had his play A Further Education at the downstair space so this isn't a new thing for someone working in the same theatre to have a play debut in the same space
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Post by wiggymess on Jan 11, 2018 3:29:43 GMT
If she's been accepted on the channel 4 writing programme then she is clearly a gifted writer, regardless of all this.
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Post by bellboard27 on Jan 11, 2018 9:22:02 GMT
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Post by chameleon on Jan 11, 2018 10:32:45 GMT
Will Mortimer, the Literary Manager at Hampstead Theatre had his play A Further Education at the downstair space so this isn't a new thing for someone working in the same theatre to have a play debut in the same space Yup. Also a very mediocre play. Very easy to convince yourself that your mate's play, or your partner's play, or your colleague's play, or your own play is better than it is. Which is fine if you're not using public funding to produce it. Much respect to Trevor Nunn, who waited until he'd left the National Theatre before producing Imogen Stubbs' play in the West End.. |
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Post by chameleon on Jan 11, 2018 14:22:55 GMT
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