Opportunities for UK playwrights overseas

Pornography, a new play by Olivier Award-winning writer Simon Stephens that premiered earlier this year, was big news. In Germany. The play, by a writer whose previous work includes On the Shore Of The Wide World and Motortown, was commissioned by the Hamburg Schauspielhaus and Hanover's Theaterformen.

According to an interview Stephens gave to The Guardian, the reason was partly the subject matter – he felt that it was too soon to write for the British stage about the 7/7 London bombings – and partly because he was excited about working with director Sebastian Nübling.

But does the fact that a leading young British playwright has undertaken a major commission overseas have any broader significance for British theatre?

Howard Gooding, an agent for Judy Daish Associates who works extensively with theatres in Europe and the rest of the world, doesn’t think so. “It’s very rare for new plays by British writers to be commissioned overseas,” he says. Not only are there language barriers to establishing the working relationship, but it would tend not to be in the writers’ financial interest. Far better to get the commission in the UK and then have the play translated for performance overseas.

In any case, as Gooding says, theatres overseas “tend to want pieces that have already been a success in the UK.” So, it is with translated work that most British playwrights will have the best chance of performances overseas.

“The major foreign language markets for British playwrights are France and Germany,” Howard Gooding explains. “Spain and Italy come next, and then there’s a whole range of countries who have a smaller but ongoing interest. Brazil and Mexico are two that seem to have grown in recent years.”

The English speaking world, notably North America and Australia, provides another major market, of course, but it is the opportunities for work to be translated and performed all round the world that often takes new British writers by surprise. We import so little theatre ourselves that we might not think that a theatre in, say, Estonia, would want to stage our work. The fact is, however, that British theatre writing is held in the very highest regard. “All the theatres overseas have got their eyes on what’s happening in London,” Gooding says. “Once the reviews are out things can happen very fast.”

The biggest challenge for the overseas agent and theatre will normally be getting a good translation, especially if the writer has not been translated in that language before. A wide variety of plays have seen success in translation over the years. Work by Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter is pretty much always running somewhere, while Closer by Patrick Marber was one of the biggest hits of recent years.

The works of the 1990s Royal Court generation of people like Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane have also been widely translated and performed.

Indeed, writing in The Guardian, Ravenhill has argued that rights from productions overseas have enabled him to make a living from writing plays: “The fact is, like a lot of British playwrights, I don't make my living from productions of my plays in this country. All the first productions have happened here, but subsequent productions have been elsewhere. It is the royalties from these that mean I can pay the rent and not have to leave theatre behind and write episodes of other people's TV series.”

Whether this really is the experience of a lot of British playwrights is debatable. While a writer might get about 60% of the royalty from a show (allowing 40% to go to the translator and overseas agent), unless the play becomes a huge hit, the revenues are not usually substantial.

Having said that, plays do tend to stay in rep longer than in the UK, so while the stream of income for a writer might be small, it can continue for many years.

Any British writers wanting to get productions overseas should probably start by talking to their agent. Failing that, if they have a track record, the British Council might be willing to aid a writer and foreign producer. However, the best way to get attention overseas, is to get attention here first.

Nick Wood writes:

It was luck, the way my work first got in Europe. I wrote Warrior Square for Andrew Breakwell at Nottingham Playhouse and he sneaked it into the Frankfurt Playwright’s Festival on the back of the invited Mike Kenny piece – same cast, same set, buy one, get one free.

Andreas from the Hans Otto Theatre in Potsdam liked it, he talked to Paul Harman, and Paul, who’d never met me, found me an agent.  The first thing I heard was an email telling me I had a play going on in Germany. Since then there’ve been another five produced, two I wrote for the Hans Otto and the Thalia in Hamburg.

I got involved by happy accident, but it is possible to go about it in a more ordered way. German agents are amazingly proactive and you have to have one. They publish your play. Theatres go to agents looking for new work. They find, and pay your translator upfront.

If you have a script that has been produced in the UK, send it to an agent, not to a dramaturge at a theatre, it will be read. Virtually every town in Germany has a theatre, sometimes more than one. It is common to have dedicated premises for drama, young peoples’ theatre, dance, opera, and puppets. The rep system means that there is often a different play on each night. This is the audiences’ expectation. There can be as many as thirty plays in current production, and each year there are expected to be ten, or fifteen or more premieres.

There is a huge appetite for new work. In Germany a play can open on a Tuesday and, the same week, have second or third productions elsewhere. Recently Dario Fo had over 200 productions current all over Germany. The royalties are lower than here, but that’s compensated for by the number of possible productions and the potential for your work remaining in the repertoire for a long time. I couldn’t understand when Warrior Square opened in Potsdam at the start of November, why there were only seven more performances before the New Year. Five years later, it’s still getting three or four performances a month.

Agents fees high – mine are 25% and I know German writers who pay more. And the translators have their 15-20% royalty too. But without agent or translator there’s no production, and if you’re lucky, as I’ve been, the relationship is productive and supportive and develops from play to play, and you’ll end up not begrudging them a penny. The rest of Europe comes to Germany for new work, so the opportunities for further productions in other countries is a real one.

Don’t try to get your work on in Germany if you think it’ll make you a fortune, it won’t. But if you’re open to the adventure of making theatre in another culture, you’ll find a welcome, and have a lot of fun.

Richard Pinner writes:

I think the key for playwrights approaching Europe can be summed up by the old Biblical aphorism ‘cast your bread on the waters and it will come back to you’ - as this has certainly been my experience, particular working in some of the newer members of the EEC, like Slovenia, Hungary and Rumania.

In other words, don’t expect immediate, highly lucrative returns (because the theatre in these countries is not as well-funded as the UK and its practitioners are often only semi-professional) but there is definitely an appetite and interest for contemporary plays from Britain and opportunities for these to be performed. And you’d be surprised by how robust and popular the theatre tradition is in a country like Slovenia: with a population of only 7 million, they still support and fully patronise some 15 or so producing theatres, some of them with over 1000-seater auditoria.

Then once you’ve made contact, one thing may lead to another. For example, when I was leading workshops in playwriting in Ljubljana I tutored a 23- year-old Serbian lady, Ana Lasic, on a play she was working on, entitled Anti, which was subsequently taken-up by the National Theatre of Slovenia. For this, she earned no more than a few thousand Euros but, during the run, an Austrian impresario saw the play and contracted it for a major tour of German-speaking Europe, taking in Berlin, Munich and Vienna, for which she grossed a great deal more. And, interestingly, the first version of this play she wrote in English (knowing that it had much more commercial potential in the lingua franca) before it was translated into Slovenian and then German.

The lesson being, that the cultural intercourse of Continental Europe is much more fluid than we realise this side of the English Channel. Yet everywhere I travel I am continually being asked, do I have any suitable plays in my portfolio and, equally, could I recommend any exciting new work currently doing the rounds in England.

Indeed on my last-but-one visit to central Europe, David Edgar’s The Prisoner’s Dilemma was being produced in Nova Gorica and Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping And Fucking was playing at a major theatre in Budapest. Admittedly, I have been fortunate in that my teaching in playwriting – workshops and lecture tours – have lead me to many contacts, enabling my plays to be performed in countries as disparate as Finland and Romania. However, there is undoubtedly considerable opportunity out there for anyone who takes a bit of initiative.

So, where does one start? Obviously if you have published work, plays in performance or, even better, have recently won an award for a play, you have a ready calling-card. As to discovering the contacts, they are readily found on the web. For example, visit the Slovenian National Theatre site and you’ll find that the Literary Manager at Nova Gorica is Tea Rogelj or, if you’re searching for a bigger player, then the major agency promoting English speaking plays in the German territories is Theatreverlag, a branch of Litag, based in Bremen. Then, as I re-iterate, you just ‘cast your bread’.

I certainly can’t promise that there’s a fortune to be made but I do know that once you’ve been successful and been produced in Europe, however modestly, there’s every chance that more dough will be in the offing!

These articles were first published in the Guild's magazine, UK Writer (Autumn 2007)