Playwrights have the titan Michael Frayn to thank for the most apposite phrase to describe our perpetual condition. Frayn wrote the screenplay for the 1986 film Clockwise, and at the lowest moment of headteacher Brian Stimpson – played by an end-of-tether John Cleese – he articulates something that might well be pinned above every playwright’s desk. “It’s not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand,” Stimpson says, while lying on the ground dressed in monk’s robes.
It’s an unwelcome, familiar feeling. I’m waiting to hear back from a major theatre to see if I’ve been selected as one of two writers whose ideas they want to develop, selected from a shortlisted pool of eight hopefuls. I’m also waiting to hear from another theatre if they are going to stage the play they commissioned me to write in 2019. It’s not looking good, but you never know. Playwrights: we live in a far worse condition than despair, we live in hope.
With this in mind, Colchester’s Mercury Theatre has found a way to ladle another scoop of hope into the playwright’s bowl of despair – but with a twist. The Play Lottery – an idea conceived by the producer Jamie Rycroft – encourages playwrights to send in a finished play, with the winner being drawn out of a hat. The victorious writer will see their play staged at the Mercury in April.
The organisers claim it’s free to enter, but like checking out of the Hotel California, I feel like those terms and conditions need closer examination. Prospective entrants be warned: there is no such thing as a free playwriting competition. The terms and conditions might tell you there’s no fee, but you’ll be paying from your account of hope.
And yet. Working in, writing for, British theatre at the moment can feel like something of a lottery. I’ve lost count of the number of artists I know who have lamented in public and private that they’ve been knocked back in their pursuit of funding for a project, despite being told their applications are strong and fit all the criteria. Grantium, Arts Council England’s online application portal, is essentially a swear word in artistic circles. There’s less money to go around, but there are no fewer scripts worthy of being produced that are landing on the desks of theatre literary departments.
All theatres are having to tighten the purse strings and make their meagre funding spread thinner and further than ever. This means fewer productions on stages, with the chance of a building taking a risk on your play vanishingly small.
Even without financial hurdles, if you are lucky enough to have a theatre read your play, there is the barrier of a small group of tastemakers who dictate what gets put on stage. It is an unfortunate truth that those tastemakers have for decades looked and thought a certain way. If your private school education prepared you for Oxbridge and those hallowed halls prepared you for cultural leadership, how can you judge the authenticity or quality of, say, a working-class writer raised on an estate? Andrea Dunbar is an example of such a writer who did break through, but rare though she was, she was no unicorn. There are other Andreas, but I could weep thinking about how unlikely we are to find them in the current system. Why? If your scripts are good enough, they’ll rise to the top, goes one argument. The real question is, who’s deciding what’s “good enough”?
Earlier this week, I was interviewing Emma Rice on Radio 4’s Front Row about her latest production, Blue Beard. Rice revealed that she had considered making this show her swansong and walking away from the industry because of the increasing difficulties of bringing work to the stage. If Rice, one of British theatre’s most bankable prospects of the past two decades, is struggling, what hope for the rest of us?
So, why not turn the whole affair into an actual game of stick on a blindfold and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, à la the Mercury Theatre? A number on a ball plucked out of a whirling tombola barrel?
Sure, there will be arguments about quality control. “What about the dedication to craft?” playwrights will lament (we do a lot of lamenting). “What about the respect for the work?” All of which are relevant points if we’re operating in a genuine meritocracy. Which, obviously, we’re not.
Instead, we’re operating in a landscape where a finished script has as much chance of being your winning ticket as a lucky dip-selected six numbers on a Saturday night. We’re already throwing scripts at a roulette wheel, so sure, why not. The Mercury’s scheme just means another space at the table where playwrights can stack up our chips and condemn ourselves to a place we know all too well: the purgatory of hope.
Nick Ahad is a presenter for BBC Radio Leeds and BBC Radio 4’s Front Row and the author of several plays
