Stage Struck

We need action on producing plays, says PETER CRAWLEY

LET’S GET back to basics. Where does a piece of theatre begin? Well, if you come from a writer-centred tradition, you’d summon up your contemporary sensibility and say that it’s the moment a person puts quill to parchment. “If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage.”

But if you hold with theatrical fundamentalist Peter Brook – “A man walks across [an] empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre” – then the writer is not essential.

This position has seemed antagonistic since the powdered- wig dictats of Gotthold Lessing, or the director-centred manifesto of Gordon Craig, and it has put the words “play” (the written text) and “production” (the performance, sundry other texts and context) on either sides of something resembling a holy war.

“The play’s the thing,” say the traditionalists, quoting Hamlet.

“No,” say the radicals, “the production is the thing and, besides, Hamlet actually uses a site-specific performance which foregrounds the method of its own manufacture, incorporates additional text, political subtext, intertextual references, notes for actors and aesthetic guidelines to catch the conscience of the king. How about another symposium?”

Is this why the new play has come to resemble an endangered species: a delicate and rare creature, whose continuation should be encouraged, nurtured and protected, even if it is rarely released back into the wild?

Bernard Farrell recently praised the literary department of the Abbey Theatre, which staged his first unsolicited play in 1979, and spoke of a national resource “doing nothing else only looking at new plays” and “seeing are they good enough to go on”.

The department has other duties, including commissioning work and running a New Playwrights Programme, but Farrell's early experience now seems anachronistic. With few exceptions, a new play at the Abbey these days is more likely to be from another company's commission, such as B for Babyor Alice in Funderland, or by a very well-established writer – such as Bernard Farrell.

The Dublin Theatre Festival, long associated with the creation of new Irish work, has announced Play On, an open call to the next generation of playwrights for mentorship, which, like the Lir’s playwriting master’s, suggests an intervention is necessary. We’ve forgotten how to write plays.

To judge from Fishamble: The New Play Company and Tiny Plays for Ireland (which received 1,700 micro submissions), the impulse to write for theatre hasn’t shrunk. But the gap between a play and a production is wide.

Playwrights don’t develop unless their work meets an audience. Without a consistent commitment to putting new plays into production, all these open calls, slush piles, casual commissions and development programmes look like an endless tunnel of process and enshrine a false distinction between the writer and the maker.

We have plenty of new plays to read. We just need to turn them into something more – something we can see.