Theatre

‘My thinking comes from recognising that a commission from a high status theatre such as the Royal Court has a huge weight of expectation attached to it, which can be quite inhibiting for a writer at home on their own. I was interested in seeing whether there are other ways of creating plays. So we started the Rough Cuts seasons, which are experimental seasons of work in progress. We’re also starting a studio here where writers have the chance either to research something or to explore an idea with actors, a director, or an artist from another field. Rough Cuts has been successful because there is a pressure in the process, in that something has to be presented to an audience. But we haven’t made a commitment beyond that point. We’re asking writers to come and spend a couple of weeks with us, and to try out an idea for a couple of nights in front of a small audience – the worst thing that can happen is that it doesn’t work, but hopefully over those two weeks there will have been some kind of exploration. Feature continues

‘I’ve also been doing a week with six of our commissioned writers, which doesn’t involve directly working on plays. We’ve had John Wright coming in and doing mask work with them, somebody talking about Meisner technique and Mervyn Millar talking about puppets and object animation. It’s not really that we’re expecting writers to create plays with masks, but it’s about finding other ways of thinking about their work.’