The Centre’s Visiting Professor is Dr Aleks Sierz, author of the seminal In-Yer-Face Theatre, The Theatre of Martin Crimp, the first major appraisal of the playwright’s work, and Re-Writing the Nation, launched at the National Theatre in February 2011. Fellows of the College associated with the work of the Centre include Tanika Gupta MBE, Nick Stafford, Roy Williams, Annie Castledine, Tony McHale and Bill Bryden CBE.
New Writing is a feature of several undergraduate and postgraduate programmes where plays have been commissioned from established playwrights including Meredith Oakes, Robert Holman, Gregory Motton, Bola Agbaje, Michael Bhim and Joel Horwood, and from emerging playwrights mentored by Simon Stephens, resulting in performances at the College and in London venues. These and new texts to be developed with Paines Plough form the basis of a growing collection housed in the Centre.
Urban Scrawl, a unique online audio drama project, was a collaboration between the College, theatreVOICE, Theatre 503 and 53 writers including Mark Ravenhill (project Patron) and Laura Wade. Urban Scrawl was initiated by Dominic Cavendish, founding editor of theatreVOICE, and Gene David Kirk, Programming Editor of Theatre 503, assumed the role of Artistic Director of the project. The plays were produced at the College by a team led by Professor Philip Wigley, with Pat O’Toole (Project Manager), Ben Davies (Project Co-ordinator) and Marina Calderone who, as Creatives Trainer, implemented the project with a mix of professional and student directors, technicians and 120 actors.
First heard on theatreVOICE the plays are now collected with introductory notes on a specially designed audio website developed by the College. This primary source material forms the basis of a reflective commentary on the project to be published in 2011. Moreover, the Urban Scrawl format has been adopted for a current research project involving new writing entitled Follow the Flame which is being prepared for production and dissemination during 2012 as part of the Cultural Olympiad.
Translation and Performance was initiated in 2005 resulting in annual colloquia involving rehearsed readings and round table discussions at the College, Theatre Royal Haymarket and The Unicorn Theatre, and publications in collaboration with the Euro Theatro Association, CAOS Editorial (Madrid) and Spain’s Ministry of Culture. The twelve plays in the original Spanish and English translations (including those by Emilio Romero, Head of the College’s School of Performance and Dr Paul Rankin, University College Dublin), can be found on www.caoseditorial.com.
The Spoils is a collaboration between writer Steven Dykes and composer Paul Englishby, performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the Sala El Granero Theatre in Cuenca, Spain, and as part of the “Grimeborn Festival” at the Arcola Theatre in 2009, and will be presented by the Potomac Theatre Project in New York in 2011. The documentation for this project will form the basis of a DVD on how new work is created, rehearsed, performed and reflected upon. The Spoils was further developed in a Simultaneous Performance Project, in collaboration with Trinity College of Music and Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication, funded by Knowledge East.
The Noel Greig Archive was donated by the playwright to the College in 2009, comprising an important collection of his plays, unpublished scripts, professional papers and visual material: from political and community theatre (Brighton Combination, Inter-action, The General Will) to gay theatre (Gay Sweatshop, New Heart, Sexual Outlaws) and young people’s theatre (Red Ladder, Theatre Centre, and numerous others internationally).
The Country Setting Collection will form a digital archive of the scripts of new plays, from rehearsal draft to performance text, as seen to press by Professor Simon Trussler for Nick Hern Books, Faber and Faber, and Methuen Drama from 1993 to the present day. With playwrights’ personal archives now largely digital, for many plays this may well be the only extant source for scholars, subject to appropriate permissions, to explore the evolution of a writer’s ideas during the rehearsal process.
For more information, please visit: http://theatrefutures.org.uk/new-writing-research-centre/