Ten Days,Ten Plays at the Finborough
The Finborough Theatre has announced a ten-day festival of
new work by playwrights discovered, developed or championed by the critically-acclaimed
Earls Court venue. Vibrant! Festival of Finborough Playwrights,
running from 6-17 October, will showcase ten new plays by ten exciting writers,
some UK-based, others from as far afield as New Zealand.
Among
the homegrown talent featured will be Simon Vinnicombe whose play Year 10 was a Time Out Critics’
Choice, transferring to Battersea Arts Centre and Festival Premières in France.
His new piece, Wisdom (7 Oct), explores the lives of a group
of fifty-somethings who must accept their lot in life or find the courage to
reach out before it is too late.
From abroad comes Green (10 Oct), a
darkly comic look at the mind of an American solider in Iraq by New Yorker Bekah
Brunstetter; Quebec-born Colleen Murphy’s The December Man /
L’homme de decembre (13 Oct) about
the aftermath of a Canadian school-massacre; and Awhi
Tapu (14 Oct), the UK debut of one of New Zealand’s most exciting
Maori playwrights, Albert Belz.
Vibrant is curated by artistic
director Neil McPherson and the Finborough Theatre Literary Department, which was established in 2005 to seek out exciting new voices for the theatre to produce. Regarded as one
of London’s finest new writing venues, the Finborough is the only UK theatre without public funding to be awarded the Pearson
Playwriting Award bursary – five times no less – as well as twice winning Pearson’s Catherine Johnson
Award for Best Play written by a bursary holder.
Other plays to feature in the festival will include Mirror
Teeth by Nick Gill (8 Oct), Driven by Colleen
Muldoon-Taylor (15 Oct) and Face Up/Face Down by Michael
Lesslie (16 Oct). Notably, the programme includes first plays of several new writers in their 30s, 40s and 50s, a demographic often overlooked by
new writing organisations. These include Three Sacks Full of
Hats (9 Oct), a hard-hitting piece about family shame and secrets written by
former bouncer Geoff Thompson.
Vibrant! will open on 6 October with Death
and the Kit-Kat (A Torture Comedy) by Anders Lustgarten, currently
Pearson playwright-in-residence, and close on 17 October with an
offering from fellow resident James Graham, entitled simply A New
Play. In 2003, a then unknown Graham sent an unsolicited script to the Finborough, since when the theatre has premiered five of his plays, including the
Pearson Award-winning Albert’s Boy and Eden’s
Empire. Proof, if it were needed, that the Finborough model bears fruit.
