Phil Setren On … The London New Play Festival
Watching Bonnie Greer’s masterful performance opposite
Nick Griffin on the now infamous edition of Question Time a
fortnight ago, it was hard to picture the fledgling playwright she once was. But Greer is among a long list of Newsnight Review types who first cut
their cultural teeth at the London New Play Festival (LNPF).
Established
in 1989, this annual new writing event also premiered the work of Mark
Ravenhill, Joe Penhall, Naomi Wallace and Anthony Neilson at venues ranging
from the Old Red Lion to the Young Vic. And after a few years off, it is back celebrating its twentieth
birthday at the Cock Tavern this month. The festival’s founding director Phil Setren
fills in the gaps.
year?
The venue has the right energy. It’s a studio space catered
to new writing and being one of the newest and most intimate venues in London,
it just has the right ethic for the festival. It’s almost feels like the Finborough
and the Old Red Lion felt like in the early days when Mark Ravenhill and Joe Penhall
were being read upstairs. It’s also one of London’s oldest music pubs – Ian
Dury and the Blockheads and the Kilburn Five both started here. So it’s an
interesting place to hold the event.
How did the festival first get started?
I came over from Toronto with a play that went to Edinburgh.
We were then invited to the Kings Head and in 1989, I got asked to look after a
small fringe theatre called the Cafe Theatre. Instead of doing the same old promoting,
we pulled together a 12-play festival and then went into a second year at the
Old Red Lion. Twenty years later, we’re still here.
What was the early ethos of the festival?
We were really interested in what was new in playwriting
today: how immediate a play could be and
what it really wanted to say to an audience. As the festival grew annually, we started
becoming this place where a lot of first-timers were able to try out their work.
With 12 plays on the go, you had a lot of playwrights, directors and actors in
a small space together.
What was the status of new writing at the time?
When we were first starting off, there was some good work
going on at The Bush and Royal Court, but there wasn’t this festival energy
where you could take a look at a huge variety of new writing. Because of our initiative
in 1989, a lot of other similar events were born. But at the time, we were really
important to the theatre calendar. Places like the Royal Court would look to us
once a year and the risks we were taking on these playwrights were starting to
influence the risks of others. We tried 10 minute plays, 15 minute plays; we even
commissioned the first play about a gay MP being outed.
Mark Ravenhill’s Close to You
in 1993. Did you know you’d found a new writing star?
Some of the script readers thought it was too rude, that
it would give us a bad name what with this character killed by a rent boy and
dragged behind a fridge. But a few of us argued that the dialogue was too funny
for us not to do it. You could tell the talent of a Mark Ravenhill. He wasn’t
just being rude for the sake of it. That was the piece that came before Shopping
and Fucking. So in a sense it was the thing that gave him confidence
to write his later plays.
Which other plays stick in the memory?
I remember The Cezanne Syndrome by Normand
Canac-Marquis, about a married couple’s relationship coming apart. It was full
of amazing imagery about being too close to the canvas or too far away, like
with Cezanne’s paintings. Then there was Laura Bridgeman’s Gay
Marriage in Suburbia, which we did at the Young Vic in 1996 before the
whole civil partnership debate. It really had something to say about British
suburban values and gay and lesbian couples. That was a big one. And that same
year we did Hoover Bag by Anthony Neilson, which was a modern
horror story set in a futuristic world where mad cow disease was the norm.
Anthony set the audience up with heart monitors to see whether their hearts would
race during the play.
Has the selection process changed over the
years?
Not really. We have a group of 15 readers and our
criteria are originality, form, language, style and content, but most of all what
the play has to say. This year, rock and pop music is a key theme. The centre
piece (Setren’s own play Three Minute Hero) is about the music business and we also
have a series of commissioned plays inspired by the Clash’s London
Calling album. We asked writers to listen to the CD and tell us if it
spoke to them.
Were you worried about including your own play?
I’m usually shy about putting on my own work. I would
only ever contribute short and group pieces. But this is something I have been
working on for many years. It’s a story of the stage door man who always dreamed
of being something else and I’m thrilled finally to be putting it on. We’re
also running our ‘Write a Play in a Day’ class, where we get 10 new writers, some
of whom have never written before, and demystify it for them. This
year, we’re doing it just for Kilburn residents so who knows? Maybe their play
could be the next one on stage.
The 2009 London New Play Festival runs until 14 November at the Cock Tavern, Kilburn. More details here.
