Writ Large - new theatre writing
David Edgar explains how a new Arts Council England report, Writ Large, reveals that new theatre writing is thriving
The number of new plays presented in the English theatre has increased dramatically over the last decade. Research commissioned by Arts Council England (ACE) demonstrates that new plays have broken out of the studio ghetto and are now more likely to be presented in large theatres than small.
In the 1980s and 1990s, new work fluctuated between 15% and 20% of the repertoire (numbers of productions) of the building-based theatre in England, largely concentrated in studio spaces. The new research - undertaken by a group of academics and playwrights (myself included) - indicates that the proportion of new plays in the repertoire has more than doubled, to 42%. Further, new plays have broken out of the studio ghetto. Overwhelmingly, new plays are now watched in auditoria with more than 200 seats.
This finding vindicates the ACE's past policy of encouraging new writing. But, ironically, it runs counter to much contemporary thinking, which sees new writing - along with all other text-based work - as a dying phenomenon.
As far back as 2000, consultant Peter Boyden argued that one of the problems of English regional theatre was that ‘text-based drama’ was in decline. The Arts Council's response to Boyden echoed this argument, insisting that theatre needed to ‘respond to a multi-cultural, digital and regional Britain’ by embracing ‘a wider range of forms and traditions’. Hitherto, the big dividing line in theatre repertoire had been between the established repertoire and new work. Now the fault-line was between all text-based drama and theatre based on devised scripts, innovative production and physically-based performance techniques.
Hence, in the ACE’s 2007 Theatre Policy review, new work was dropped as a priority, in favour of ‘experimental practice and interdisciplinary practice, circus and street arts’. In the last three months, ACE has produced three reports on theatre during the period defined by the £25m funding uplift which resulted from Peter Boyden's report. Published in the summer, Anne Millman and Jodi Myers' Theatre Assessment concluded that the £25m had both stabilised a theatre in risk of collapse and encouraged a move towards site-specific, experimental and physical theatre. However, ACE had also commissioned two further reports specifically to find out what had happened to new work. Emma Dunton, Roger Nelson and Hetty Shand's Assessment of New Writing in Theatre since 2003 looked at the small-scale, touring and experimental sector. The British Theatre Consortium's Writ Large: New Writing on the English Stage 2003-2009 as tasked to find out what had happened in the building-based theatre. The British Theatre Consortium consists of me, academic/playwrights Dan Rebellato, Julie Wilkinson and Steve Waters and Professor Janelle Reinelt.
The group's first observation was that very little was known about the recent repertoire of the English theatre. From the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, theatres told the Arts Council what kind of plays they had presented, dividing the repertoire into eight categories: classics, Shakespeare, children's plays, musicals, adaptations, post-war drama, new plays and the plays of Alan Ayckbourn (in the mid-1980s, 6% of productions in the regional theatre were written by Ayckbourn). The Council was also able to work out how well plays in the different sectors did and, eventually, to distinguish between main houses and studio theatres.
There were problems with this reporting system (notably, the categories overlapped). But funders knew, in general terms, which plays were being done, and how well they were doing.
In the past 10 years, ACE has brought in a new questionnaire, containing surprisingly little about repertoire. Theatres are asked to distinguish between new work, new commissions and the existing repertoire, but the definitions are so vague as to be meaningless (it was not clear if a ‘new commission’ was confined to a newly-commissioned play, or could apply to a newly-commissioned production) and theatres were not asked to specify the length of run, the size of auditorium or the production's box office performance. There was no break-down between other categories at all.
The authors of Writ Large issued a repertoire questionnaire to the 89 regularly-funded, overwhelmingly building-based English theatre companies, 65 of whom responded. The most dramatic finding was that new plays had increased from around 20 to 42% of all theatre shows presented by the responding companies.
Half of the new plays were presented by ten theatres (including the National, the Royal Court, the RSC and major regional theatres in Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds), but only one of theatres which responded to the survey did no new work at all. One reason for the increase is that writers aren't just writing new original plays: there have been significant increases in new adaptations and writing for children (20% of all new writing productions). New plays sold well: since 2000, attendances have grown and new work actually did better than the average in the final year of the survey.
And while there has indeed been an increase in devised work (7% of performances), this form of work is clearly not taking over from new plays written by individual playwrights. Physical theatre represents a tiny proportion of the repertoire in the building-based sector.
But the most striking finding is that most new plays are now watched in auditoria with more than 200 seats. On average, between 2003 and 2008, nine out of ten attendances at new plays in the responding theatres were in main houses. And the average box office performance of new plays on main stages was a healthy 64.7% (rising during the period of the survey).
And although the established repertoire has fallen as a proportion of the repertoire, there is little evidence that audiences are rejecting the existing canon. Dominated by Shakespeare, the classical (pre-1850) repertoire achieved the highest box office figures of any category. Text-based theatre is alive and well in the English theatre.
There are some problems to address: all three of the recent ACE reports on theatre point out that many playwrights are concerned with changes in developmental practice - notably, an increase in the role and power of dramaturgs - and there is a widespread concern that playwrights are finding it harder to sustain a life-long career (a conclusion confirmed in the Writers' Guild Theatre Committee's evidence to Writ Large). In particular, theatres seem less inclined than ever to present second productions of successful new plays.
Nonetheless, the expansion of new writing - and, in particular, its breaking out of the studio ghetto - represents a triumph for the Arts Council, for which new writing was a priority for most of the last 30 years, and for artistic directors, literary managers and dramaturgs who refused to accept the widely-held presumption that new work empties theatres.
There is, however, the obvious paradox that news of this triumph comes at a point when fashionable opinion has turned its back on the written play, in favour of work by devising, performance-based companies. For 10 years, it's been assumed that text-based theatre in general, and new writing in particular, was on the way out. In fact, it is thriving as never before.
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