Theatre News

An Award for the New Generation

Do you ever go to the theatre and feel that you could have made the play more gripping for its audience if you had been the director? If you think that you could, the Company of Angels in association with The Junction, Cambridge offers you the opportunity.

The Young Angels Theatremakers Award 2010 is a £20,000 award for young theatre-makers to develop, direct and produce a new European play for young audiences. The scheme is in its fourth year and supported by Arts Council England. Last year a production grant of £20,000 was awarded to Fanshen for their production of Blowing by Dutch author Jeroen van den Berg.

In 2008, Young Angels Theatremakers was run in collaboration with Soho Theatre and
the Embassy of Sweden, and culminated in a production of the Swedish play Invasion! at the Soho Theatre in London directed by Lucy Kerbel last spring. Three years ago two teams received a £5,000 R&D Award and access to rehearsal space. Emma Bettridge and Abigail Graham developed Jack’s Quest, a new interactive play for children, while Oystein Brager and Philip Thorne, as ImplodingFictions, staged the UK première of the Swiss play Norway.Today by Igor Bauersima.

Applications – the deadline is 16 June – from teams of emerging theatremakers under the age of 30 with track records of making work in the mainstream or on the fringe, experience in working with professional actors and experience in handling production budgets should include a CV,
a short selection of reviews or other testimonials of your work and up to 600 words outlining which of the two selected plays you would like to stage, why and how and an outline on how you would spend the money.

This year’s plays are Dead Girls Don’t Grow Up by award-winning Spanish writer Beth Escudé i Gallès translated by John [Ginman set in a society which is undergoing dramatic physical change. and Anne and Zef by Ad de Bont translated by Rina Vergano which won the 12th Dutch-German Award for theatre for young audiences in 2010. This is about two fugitives who meet in another world, Anne Frank and Albanian Zef Bunga.

Full details, including the scripts for both plays,  are available from the Company of Angels and The Junction.