Big & Bold: New Looks at New WorkDate: 4 May 2004
How do you encourage big new epics for big spaces? The National & Old Vic are amongst those pondering the problem, as the RSC launches its first annual New Work Festival. RSC dramaturg Paul Sirett explains why it’s critical to the company’s future.
At press conferences over the past few months, both Nicholas Hytner and Kevin Spacey, artistic directors of, respectively, the National Theatre and the newly formed Old Vic Theatre Company, have added their voices of concern over the dearth of today’s ‘big’ plays.
With the decades-long trend towards lower-risk, small-cast pieces for intimate studios (See “New Faces in Small Places”, Features, 12 Aug 2001), there are few new writers willing to tackle epic themes for larger performance spaces.
It’s a problem that hasn’t gone unnoticed by Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director Michael Boyd, who this September, ends his inaugural season with the company’s first annual New Work Festival in Stratford.
Just announced, the two-week event, running from 29 September to 17 October 2004, will feature four world premieres – the first from the RSC since 2001 - in addition to various performed readings, works in progress, community and educational projects. These will be staged across all of the Stratford performance spaces before transferring to Newcastle in November and, in spring 2005, on to London and a still-to-be announced, dedicated venue.
Highlights of the festival will include theatrical debuts by Generation X author Douglas Coupland and political commentator Yasmin Alibhai-Brown; and new works by Zinnie Harris, Joanna Laurens, Ron Hutchinson, Richard Nelson and Lee Hall, amongst them three post-9/11 themed pieces and a solo show based on the diaries of the late theatre critic Kenneth Tynan.
RSC dramaturg Paul Sirett explains the thinking behind the RSC’s New Work Festival and why it’s an important investment for the future of the company as well as British theatre.
Why is the RSC embarking on a whole Festival of New Work this year?
Part of the reason is that we want to relaunch the RSC's relationship with new work after the gap of the last two years. It's a refocus of attention on new work and specifically on how we want to present it.
What do you hope the Festival will bring to the rest of the 2004 Season? Is there any connection?
I think that it works on quite a few levels; for actors, there is obviously a chance to apply their skills to new work; our audience will also have the chance to see the actors who have been playing in the current season in a different genre. We wanted to investigate the influence of Shakespeare on contemporary writers and their exploration of language, poetry and metaphysics. An example of this in the play Midwinter is the link to personal tragedy, a microcosm of the individual's tragedy within the bigger picture. In Midwinter, it's a tragedy of a woman and her family and the tragedy of her circumstances - just as Hamlet is a victim of his circumstances. In the case of Jo Laurens' play Poor Beck, the story is originally from Ovid, who was a source for Shakespeare and his work, and looks at the myth of Myrrha in a way that is futuristic so you can see a direct link into that work.
Some of the pieces of work being presented are billed as 'devised' pieces. What does that mean exactly?
A devised work is usually something built from scratch from day one of rehearsal, so that the director, actors and the writer will come with some idea of what they are going to investigate together, but they have really no idea what they will finally end up with. Through an organic process of experiment and investigation, they will create a piece of work and the exciting thing is that, in the festival, we will be able to see that work-in-progress, which will change and grow over the rest of the year. It's all about process and collaboration.
How did you choose what went into the Festival?
There are three main criteria. One is work which engages with the question of what Tragedy means to us today; secondly, it's work that investigates the influence of Shakespeare on a contemporary stage; and thirdly, opportunities in programming that have arisen from the actors in the company. For example, Michael Boyd asked Clive Wood to play Pilate a long time ago, so he joined this year’s Tragedies company knowing that he would end the season in Stratford playing the lead in a new devised piece of work.
The New Work Festival feels a little like the RSC Fringe Festival used to be. Are there any similarities?
The only real similarity is the diversity of the work. Other than that this is an entirely new venture. It's a statement that we want to make about new work. In some ways, it is a showcase for the actors to demonstrate a broader range of skills like the Fringe was, but it's very much a focus for the company as opposed to lots of separate projects. The diversity also helps to bring about a creative energy which is important, and we hope audiences will be excited by the range of different events they can come and see across all the Stratford auditoria.
Will this become an annual, regular part of the RSC season in Stratford?
I hope so! The plan is that it will, but firstly we have to see how it goes this year. My hope is that this won't be the only way we will present new work, that there will also be new work that runs in parallel with the main body of the ensemble so that it's not just an isolated two-week period. Hopefully, then one will infuse the other, but that's a process that will take quite a while to feed in.
Will any of the New Work Festival transfer into London after Stratford?
Yes, that's the plan. I think the interesting thing is that it’s an ongoing process. Some of the new work might be so successful that we might think about placing it into next season's rep, although it might go through a process of change from when it begins in Stratford, travels to Newcastle and plays in London. The idea is that you don't just put on stage a piece of work that is finished; you could see a first reading of a very rough piece of work in Stratford one year, see it done as a platform presentation in London the following spring, and then see it as a full production in Stratford the following year.
Do you think new work has a place in the RSC? Should it be left to places like the Royal Court, RNT & Soho Theatres?
No! We have set out to do something very different, which is to reinvent the way new work is produced. We need to get away from the four-week rehearsal, four-week run, end-of-the-play process that has grown to be the norm over the last 30 to 40 years as the way you handle new work. We want to experiment in front of an audience, to give new work a chance to grow over a period of time, not just have one brief production and then never see the play again. We are also looking for different kinds of work; non-naturalistic, poetic, ambitious, work that maybe demonstrates the influence of Shakespeare - nobody else is exploring that type of work. We also want to encourage writers to write for all our spaces again, not just black box studio spaces. We need to create a culture where writers are excited about writing for big spaces again and actively want to engage in doing that.
Were all the productions specifically commissioned by the RSC?
They were all initiated by us apart from Head/Case - which came to us from the Belgrade and seemed to fit the criteria for the festival - and the other was Tynan. Tynan came to us via Tracy Tynan and Richard Nelson, who has had previous associations with the company, and also via Corin Redgrave, who was coming to the company to play Lear. So it seemed a perfect idea to put that into the festival. The others were very much led by us.
How is the RSC proactively encouraging new writers to submit plays for future performances?
Many writers just don't seem to be able to write for big spaces anymore, and it's our responsibility to help them engage with that. I am in the process of working with writers in doing just that. There are also writer-in-residence schemes (Zinnie Harris and Jo Laurens being the most recent examples), where the writer spends time in Stratford working with the company and learning how a theatre company works. lso, the Festival is announcing to writers that the company is interested in them again and I have been working hard to spread this message and build relationships with writers and agents so they get to understand our renewed commitment. We are in the process of recreating the energy that used to surround the RSC's attitude to new work for a new era and the Festival is the ideal place to start!
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