David Benedict on theatre
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Your support makes all the difference.Nick Dear, whose Zenobia opens on Wednesday as part of the RSC season at the Young Vic, points out that his is one of only two new plays in the RSC's 1994/5 repertoire. With the company at a policy turning point, he argues, his could be one of the last new plays you'll ever see there.
The decline of new writing is not confined to the RSC. Fewer and fewer theatres are building it into their programmes. Swimming bravely against the current, Ruth MacKenzie and Jude Kelly have developed strong new writing policies at Nottingham Playhouse and the West Yorkshire Playhouse, while London boasts the Finborough Theatre and the Soho Theatre Company in addition to the more prestigious triumvirate of the Royal Court, the Bush and Hampstead theatres. Amid a rash of new incentives in Scotland, Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre remains a haven for new playwrights.
"There's an automatic energy working on a brand-new play and I really enjoy working with writers. Many people don't." Philip Howard, the associate director of the Traverse, has just opened Andrew Alty's latest play, Something About Us (right) at the Lyric Hammersmith.
A new play is a series of dramatic questions. Only when it's produced do you find out if the writer had the right answers. Classic texts come with certain guarantees. They must work, either whole or in part - that's why they're classics. New plays have no past productions to point to, no reviews to take solace in, no copies in bookshops indicating that a publisher believed it worthy of further production. Directors have to rely on judgment backed up with good dramaturgical work.
Philip Howard believes: "Many younger directors think that the key is to demand endless rewrites, but there's no law about the right amount. A play's quality has little to do with the number of rewrites. Ultimately, you have to give the writer the benefit of the doubt. On the whole, a writer's vision is more interesting than a director's."
'Zenobia' is at the Young Vic (0171-928 6363). 'Something About Us' is at the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith (0181-741 2311)
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