Love Actually and Wicked scripts to be auctioned in support of refugees

Fifty leading playwrights have donated annotated first and special editions of play texts and musical scripts.

Annotated scripts of Love Actually, Mean Girls: The Musical and Wicked are among those which will go up for auction to raise funds for refugee artists in the UK (Katie Collins/PA) (PA Archive)

Annotated scripts of Love Actually, Mean Girls: The Musical and Wicked are among the lots which will go up for auction to raise funds for refugee artists in the UK.

Fifty leading playwrights have donated annotated first and special editions of films and play texts and musical scripts for the Out Of The Margins sale, being run by the Good Chance Theatre from September 15 to October 6.

The annotated texts include a first edition hardback of the Olivier Award-winning play Harry Potter And The Cursed Child, with notes from screenwriter Jack Thorne, and a rare boxed first edition of Leopoldstadt by Tom Stoppard, which was named best new play at the recent Tony Awards.

Playwright Stoppard said: “Good Chance has been inspirational for years past, and this auction in aid of refugee artists will ripple outwards for years to come.”

Screenwriter and director Richard Curtis, who has donated a script of his classic film Love Actually and an unpublished play, said he was “very honoured” to be part of the auction.

“I’m going to be annotating two very different items. First, a copy of the screenplay of Love Actually, which is full of things that didn’t make it into the final film and one or two things I wish hadn’t made it into the film,” he said.

“And then I’ve got a play I wrote last year, which only one person has ever read. I hope it might be an interesting read and I’ll try to mark my own work in a big red pen.”

A script of the The Theory Of Everything, the 2014 biographical film about theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, featuring annotations by writer Anthony McCarten, will also go under the hammer in the sale.

Scripts for musicals include Tina Fey’s annotated text for Mean Girls: The Musical, Winnie Holzman’s words on Wicked, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’s notes on Six The Musical and Dennis Kelly’s Matilda The Musical.

Also among the texts up for grabs is a fully annotated first edition of the Barber Shop Chronicles by Inua Ellams, and Nobel prize winner Wole Soyinka’s writings on a first edition of his adaptation of The Bacchae Of Euripides.

Texts from Jerusalem, Prima Facie, The Vagina Monologues, The Doctor, Closer, The Empress, The Play What I Wrote and Jerry Springer: The Opera are also on the list for the auction, in collaboration with Christie’s and the Auction Collective.

Each text has been marked by hand, giving unique insights into the writers’ creative process, reflections, memories, thoughts and feelings.

The proceeds of the auction will fund Good Chance Theatre’s work providing refugee artists with support in the UK as well as helping to place them in paid employment and training.

The Out of the Margins Auction will run from September 15 to October 6 and a free exhibition of selected texts will be on public display from September 20 to 28 at Christie’s Auction House in St James’s, London.