Playwrights have the giant Michael Frayn to thank for the most apt phrase to describe our eternal state. Frayn wrote the screenplay for the 1986 film Clockwise, and his portrayal of headteacher Brian Stimpson (played by John Cleese) at his worst expresses something that could hang above any playwright’s desk. “This is not despair, Laura. I can handle despair. That’s the hope I can’t stand,” Stimpson says, lying on the ground wearing a monk’s robes.
An unwelcome, familiar feeling. I’m waiting to hear from a major theater to see if I’ve been chosen from a shortlist of eight candidates as one of two writers whose ideas they want to develop. I am also waiting to hear from another theater whether they will stage the play they wrote for me in 2019. The situation doesn’t look good, but you never know. Playwrights: We are in a much worse situation than despair, we live in hope.
With this in mind, Colchester’s Mercury Theater has found a way to add another scoop of hope to the playwright’s bowl of despair; but this is with a twist. Play Lottery, an idea conceived by producer Jamie Rycroft, encourages playwrights to submit a finished play and the winner is drawn from the hat. The winning writer will see their play performed at the Mercury in April.
The organizers claim that entry is free, but like exit from Hotel California, I think these terms and conditions should be examined more closely. Prospective contestants be warned: There is no such thing as a free playwriting contest. The terms and conditions may tell you that there are no fees, but you will be paying from your hope account.
And yet. Working in, and writing for, British theater right now can feel like a bit of a lottery. I’ve lost count of the number of artists I know who have complained about being left behind in their search for funding for a project in the public and private sphere, even though they were told their application was strong and met all the criteria. Grantium, Arts Council England’s online application portal, is actually a blasphemy in arts circles. There is less money to go around, but the number of scripts worth producing that land on the desks of theater and literature departments does not decrease.
All theaters are being forced to tighten their budgets and spread their meager funds thinner and farther than ever before. This means less production on stages, and the chances of a building being compromised in your game are slim to none.
Even if there are no financial obstacles, if you are lucky enough to have your play performed in a theater, there is the obstacle of a small group of tastemakers who determine what gets on stage. It’s an unfortunate truth that the creators of this taste have looked and thought a certain way for decades. If your private school education prepared you for Oxbridge and those hallowed halls prepared you for cultural leadership, how can you judge the originality or quality of, say, a working-class writer brought up on an estate? Andrea Dunbar is an example of such a groundbreaking writer, but although she was rare, she was no unicorn. There are other Andreases, but I could cry thinking about how unlikely we are to find them in the current system. From where? One bet is that if your scripts are good enough, they will rise to the top. The real question is; Who decides 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 was considering making this show her swan song and stepping away from the industry due to the increasing difficulties of bringing the work to the stage. If Rice, one of British theatre’s most reliable prospects of the last two decades, is struggling, what hope is there for the rest of us?
So why not turn the whole thing into a real play, with blindfolds and pins on the donkey’s tail, like at the Mercury Theatre? The number on a ball pulled from a spinning tombola barrel?
Of course, there will be debates about quality control. “What about dedication to the craft?” playwrights will lament (we lament a lot). “What about respect for work?” These are all important points if we are operating in a true meritocracy. Frankly, we are not.
Instead, we work in an environment where a finished script has as much chance of being your winning ticket as a lucky one out of six numbers chosen on Saturday night. We’re already throwing scenarios on the roulette wheel, so sure, why not. Mercury’s plan means another area at the table where playwrights can stack our chips and condemn ourselves to a place we know all too well: the purgatory of hope.