It has been called the “heartbeat” of the National Theatre. Housed in a brutalist building in London’s South End, the Studio was founded in 1984 as a five-year experiment to develop new work away from the public eye. “Until we set up the Studio,” says its founding director, Peter Gill, “there was a sense that the National was not for new writers.”
Forty years later, the Studio, now home to the New Work department, was behind many of the National’s hits. The team developed three of the four shows up for best play at this year’s Olivier awards in this building: Beth Steel’s Till the Stars Come Down, Jack Thorne’s The Motive and the Cue and James Graham’s award-winning Dear England. At the entrance, a board grid lines writers’ hangouts and artists’ workshops. A laboratory, a haven, a place where questions can be asked and ambitions expanded with the time and space they need.
There were two guys running around with ladders overhead, and Tom Morris was saying, “This is going to be great!”
So what happens inside? My visits begin in the script room, crammed with shelves, as the National’s artistic director, Rufus Norris, nears the end of his 10-year tenure. “I’m the first director of the National Theatre who doesn’t come from a literary background,” he says. “I didn’t go to university. As a result, this has always been a home for me, much more than for my predecessors.”
Norris uses the building to develop scripts and explore stagings, most recently for Nye, a play about the birth of the NHS. “I went through 41 drafts with Tim Price,” he says, referring to Nye’s writer. Their sessions also explored the show’s hospital setting – they pushed “a lot of squalid beds” around to save time during rehearsals.
Theatre’s greatest hits have been stress-tested here, from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time to One Man, Two Guvnors. “I came to the first workshop for War Horse here,” Norris says. “Two guys running around with a ladder over their heads, and the assistant director, Tom Morris, saying, ‘This is going to be great!'”
As in any lab, some experiments fizzle out rather than shine, even some of Norris’s own cherished ideas. “This is also where projects go to die,” he says disarmingly, going on to describe “the best part of a show we didn’t do.” It was “a work based on songs by a remarkable, now-dead rock musician. It was great stuff – but not in the opinion of either of the two people who own the rights.”
Nina Steiger, head of play development, takes me through the archive and says: “It’s completely open to the public and free – years of theatre history are beautifully captured.” Norris says that when Anupama Chandrasekhar was in residence, she watched films of shows written for the Olivier stage. “You can see [echoes of] Amadeus and his other works appear in his plays The Godfather and The Assassination.”
A writer’s first encounter with the building will often be a six-week commitment. “It’s paid, of course!” says Steiger. “They get a room and a computer and a community of other artists – at a critical time in their career.” The current crop of artists emerge for a chat on the landing: collegiality is a big part of the Studio. “There’s this idea that writers are loners,” says playwright Tamsin Oglesby. “But I don’t think we are.”
Every writer gets something different out of their time here. For Sam Grabiner, finding some peace has proven to be a blessing. “Until about three weeks ago,” he says, “I was writing in my bedroom, about two feet from my bed. I live with eight people, and six of them are very noisy.” Grabiner, now the National’s writer in residence, finds his room inviting and productive: He has two desks for separate projects, and he’s brought along his grandfather’s old Charlie Chaplin statue. “If you could imagine how a writer’s life would be structured and supported,” he says, “it would look something like this.”
During the pandemic, which studio head Rachel Twigg called “the most difficult time in theatre history”, the team devised the Generate programme, which offers a third of the workshop’s resources to artists and makers outside London. As Norris says: “This is a major research and development hub for the talent pool. We’re lucky to have it and it’s our duty to share it.”
Twigg takes me into the Generate workshop, where Peter O’Rourke is developing a show for his puppet theatre company Cubic Feet. The puppets are already frighteningly lifelike, all blue hair and mesmerizing eyes. “I’ve had a wonderful few days trying out ideas,” O’Rourke says. “My work is unscripted, so having the puppeteers in the room is a great resource.”
Is there an art to knowing when the studio development window is right? “The best thing,” says Twigg, “is not to be so close to rehearsal that your discoveries can’t be implemented, but not too early: in the Post-it note era, you don’t need people in the room.” Just beyond the Post-it notes are British/French physical theatre producers Bert and Nasi. The duo are delighted with their high-ceilinged space. “We usually start in a fairly small room,” Nasi explains. “Suddenly, we can see things a little bigger.”
Relating to: ‘You don’t need to be invited, you invite’: Beth Steel talks about working class family saga
I have a quick lunch with Beth Steel, sparkling in budgie colors. Like many writers, her first contact with the New Works department was to send a hopeful script. “You don’t need to attach your CV,” she says. “You just have to write your play and send it in. I still remember getting that paragraph in response. Did I burst into tears? Yes, of course. It was very encouraging. You don’t write into a void.”
Gradually, her work found its way onto Steiger’s radar. “As a writer, you can’t get anywhere without someone to champion you. I found that in Nina.” Steel’s time as writer in residence led to this year’s compelling Till the Stars Come Down, a play about a troubled family wedding. “We felt confident about doing the play in the round because we did a workshop right before the rehearsal. The director, Bijan Sheibani, started walking around the room and said, ‘We could put this on a revolving stage.’ That fed into a lot of things—the revolving stage, the wedding ring, the cosmos.”
Being in residence gave Steel a salary (“Money is one of the big unspoken things in theatre”) and access to the wider life of the National. “Attending the joint meetings and hearing brilliant theatre minds like Lyndsey Turner or Dominic Cooke analyse a play opened up different sides of my brain. It was the university experience I’d never had.”
Relating to: ‘We’ve stirred some heads’: Roy Williams talks about coping with a fractured nation in The Death of England
Development can expand ideas as they distill their expression. The National’s associate artistic director, Clint Dyer, explains that the first draft of his monologue play Death of England contained a large number of characters. It was only after he and co-writer Roy Williams had experimented with a full cast that they narrowed it down to a single voice. “Because we were able to workshop,” Dyer says, “the foundations of the work are deep.”
I sit with Steiger and Twigg in their shared office at the entrance to the building. Most nights, they and their team visit venues big and small around the country. “I see ridiculous things,” Steiger says. “That’s where the talent is. We’re all looking for different things. For me, it’s often about watching a writer develop. We’re looking for artists who will fill the Dorfman Stage at the National three to five years from now.” For Twigg, the rhythm of the building feels like the steady rhythm of the tide. Each week, a new series of workshops arrives, hurtling toward “sharing” on Friday. She recalls sharing Alexander Zeldin’s heartbreaking play Love. “Alex said, ‘I have three different endings to show you.’ It was devastating to see the actors come up with the idea of Anna Calder-Marshall’s character ‘walking through the woods where she dies,’ as Alex puts it. It was absolutely amazing.”
I’m on my way out the door. Next year Norris will be replaced by Indhu Rubasingham. “She used the studio a lot,” Dyer says. “She’s a veteran.” Steel remembers meeting her there. “It was great to meet Indhu,” he says, “and her saying, ‘What do you want to write? Let’s do it.’ That’s never happened to me before!”