Royal Court’s Vicky Featherstone: ‘We live off the hopes and dreams of writers’

As she directs her final show at the Sloane Square new writing theatre, Vicky Featherstone talks to Andrzej Łukowski about Michael Wynne’s ‘Cuckoo’, controversies and what she’s doing next

‘The Royal Court has always existed to find who the writers of tomorrow are. What it has to do is keep moving forwards’ (Jill Mead/Guardian/Eyevine)

Do you know what?” laughs Vicky Featherstone. “I tried to write an AI play the other night. And it was awful, like a really bad television treatment: AI can’t write a play, it literally doesn’t know how to do it.”

Featherstone is long-term (and now outgoing) artistic director of London’s Royal Court, the UK’s leading new writing theatre (that is to say a theatre that only stages new work, with almost no revivals of old plays). It’s one of the most high-pressure and scrutinised jobs in UK theatre, second only to running the National Theatre. But one of the few developments in new writing she doesn’t need to worry about is the rise of ChatGPT et al. Sure, the UK’s premiere new writing theatre is exactly where you’d expect to go to see a play about the sundry other debilitating changes artificial intelligence is going to inflict on our lives. But despite the tech-bro hype, it turns out AI absolutely cannot write plays. Result!

Although the building dates back to Victorian times, the Royal Court story as we know it began in 1956 with the foundation of the English Stage Company, which is essentially the organisation Featherstone runs today. With a mission to spotlight new and experimental writers, it revolutionised theatre with its third play, Look Back In Anger by John Osborne: his realist depiction of an embittered young working-class man essentially changed the course of stage history, breaking the dominance of posh establishmentarians like Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan, paving the way for everything from punk rock to EastEnders.