by Playwrights have titan Michael Frayn to thank for the most apt phrase to describe our enduring condition. Frayn wrote the script for the 1986 film Clockwise, and at the lowest moment of the lead Brian Stimpson – played by the end-title John Cleese – he expresses something that could be pinned above every playwright’s desk. “It’s not despair, Laura. I can take the despair. That’s the hope I can’t stand,” says Stimpson, lying on the ground dressed in monk’s robes.
It’s a familiar but unwelcome feeling. I’m waiting to hear back from a major theater to see if I’ve been selected as one of two writers who want to develop their ideas, selected from a shortlisted group of eight hopefuls. I’m also waiting to hear from another theater if they’re 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 condition far worse than despair, we live in hope.
With this in mind, Colchester’s Mercury Theater has found a way to inject another glimmer of hope into the playwright’s bowl of despair – but with a twist. The Play Lottery – an idea conceived by producer Jamie Rycroft – encourages playwrights to submit a finished play, with the winner drawn from a hat. The winning writer will see their play on stage at the Mercury in April.
The organizers claim it’s free to enter, but like checking out of the Hotel California, I feel those terms and conditions require a closer examination. Potential entrants be warned: there is no such thing as a free drama competition. The terms and conditions may tell you there is no fee, but you will be paying for your hope account.
And yet. Lottery can be working in, writing for, British theater right now. I’ve lost count of the number of artists I know who have publicly and privately lamented being turned down in their pursuit of funding for a project, despite being told their application is strong and -they fit all the criteria. Grantium, Arts Council England’s online application portal, is a buzzword in artistic circles. There is less money to go around, but no fewer scripts worth producing are landing on the desks of the theatre’s literary departments.
All the theaters have to tighten the purse strings and make their meager funding thinner and longer than ever. This means fewer performances on stage, and your performance may be compromised by a small building.
Even without financial obstacles, if you’re lucky enough to get a theater reading for a play, there’s a small group of tastemakers who decide what gets put on stage. It is an unfortunate fact that the tastemakers for years look and thought in a certain way. If your private school education prepared you for Droichead na Rinne 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 broke through, but rarely, although she was, she was not a unicorn. There are other Andreas, but I could cry thinking how likely we are to find them in the current system. Why? If your scripts are good enough, they will rise to the top, one argument goes. The real question is, who is deciding what is “good enough”?
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Earlier this week, I was interviewing Emma Rice on Radio 4’s Front Row about her latest production, Blue Beard. Rice revealed that she considered making this show her swan song and leaving the industry due to the increasing difficulties of bringing work to the stage. If Rice, one of the most bankable prospects in British theater for decades, is struggling, what hope do the rest of us have?
So why not turn the whole affair into an actual stick-on-a-pole and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game, à la the Mercury Theatre? A number on a ball plucked from a whirlwind tombola barrel?
Certainly, there will be arguments about quality control. “What about the commitment to craftsmanship?” playwrights will cry (we cry a lot). “What about the respect for the work?” These are all relevant points if we are operating in true meritocracy. Which, of course, we are not.
Instead, we’re operating in a landscape where a finished script has as much chance of being your winning ticket as six lucky numbers on a Saturday night. We are already throwing scripts at the roulette wheel, so sure, why not. Mercury’s scheme is just another space at the table where dramatists can stack our chips and condemn ourselves to a place we know all too well: the purgatory of hope.
