Playing for attention: Scene Three by Naomi Guss [Arts Hub Australia, Thursday, December 22, 2005] Emerging playwrights beware: it takes more than good writing to get your play into production. CLICK HERE TO JUST READ SALLY'S CONTRIBUTION (or just start from the top and read the whole article!) Naturally, theatre is art, and art is in the eye of the beholder. One must remember that being accepted into a playwright competition or season of works is not just about good writing, it’s about taste. And the interesting thing is that lately there has been a huge influx in the short play, from short play seasons to short play competitions - as if to say that people can not handle more than five minutes of something new. Arts Hub brings you the final instalment in our three part series on the state of Australian playwriting by Naomi Guss. “Ben Ellis, judge of the 2004 Glen Eira Short Stage Play Award sheds some light on the appeal of the Short Play. ‘Short plays are often tantalizing glimpses into the puzzle of a playwright for an audience, and glimpses into the puzzles of playwriting itself for a playwright. In a shorter space of time, the playwright gets the chance to try any number of things.' Of course the other appealing aspect of the shortie that Ben didn’t cover is that if you hate one of them, you only have to stare at the back of the bad haircut on person front of you for about 15 minutes and you’re on to something else. Go see a shortie today.” (Read more about it here). Competitions may be an important part of playwrighting, but submitting work to companies can be just as tricky - many companies also only accept full-length scripts that have had a professional workshop, or ones that have gone through a formal assessment. Hard to do unless a) you have money to pay for the assessment, as most of the playwright organisations have paid services b) you have a local company already using your script, which probably means that you have a good chance at having it performed anyway. Naturally, entering competitions and submitting to companies is not just about getting your script performed, but for many, this is the only chance to see their scripts performed and produced professionally. It’s one of those catch twenty-twos. Ashley Walker from Sydney is a graduate of the 2004 NIDA Playwrights Studio. He has experienced the problems of submitting work. He has had work produced in the Sydney Short & Sweet competition since 2001, and has collaborated with Erth, a physical and visual theatre group. He also writes for television, working on ABC’s The Glass House. Despite this, he has not had a full-length play produced, and is new to the theatre industry. Walker has found that in Sydney, theatre companies are more likely to produce your script if they receive a proposal from entire creative team, not just a playwright. He cites Darlinghurst Theatre Company, which he says only accepts proposals from complete production teams. “It makes sense that your work is more likely to be produced if it has some well known people attached. It seems getting a company to produce a script from a submission from an unknown writer is a bit of a lottery”. Nicholas Pickard, earlier this year, highlighted this problem. “The fringe [is] a body of practitioners who exist without the support or approval of an independent venue. They are the theatre practitioners that can't get past a submission process, let alone break into paid work at a flagship theatre company. “…What concerns me most is the lack of variety entering our independent theatre, particularly new Australian playwrighting that tests the boundaries of our directors, designers and our actors; that is inherently theatrical and is developing the craft of theatre; that is risk-taking and that is unique to Australia. One of the major problems with the independent scene in Sydney is the effect of the submission process. The criteria of the submissions is weighted almost entirely on the commercial/marketing/advertorial merits of a theatre production - and with each venue receiving over 100 competing submissions each year, it is diluting a lot of what Sydney's theatre practitioners want to do and the effect is catastrophic. The end result for independent theatre and audiences is that these 60-100 seat venues who are desperate to stay commerically viable make conservative and predictable programming decisions for the year ahead. Exciting, adventurous and challenging theatre is being pushed to the edges as an economic irrelevance.” Community groups are actually one of your best bets at getting your script produced. Many companies do short works seasons, allowing emerging writers to test their work in amateur groups. Despite this great opportunity though, it only provides little to one’s CV, and doesn’t actually seem to make it easier to get your work produced via professional companies and competitions. Amateur groups do not count as ‘formal assessment or professional workshop’, despite the fact that they have been workshopped and rehearsed, and performed. Alan Hornby, a writer and actor in WA (who recently launched Armpit Plays, a new resource for unpublished plays), is always amazed at the amount of local playwrights in Australia. “We must have more produce-able playwrights per head of population than anywhere else in the world, and the most conservative publishers”. Hornby has entered two competitions in Australia, not winning any, and three in the UK, with one winner there. He also had a play win in the US. He feels that the current situation for emerging playwrights has come down to a “who you know and studied with, rather than quality of writing”. He also worries that we are heading down a road of formulaic writing, with plays being developed and produced becoming more mainstream. His advice on getting your plays produced – do it yourself is the easiest, but the best way is to get funding. Like many other playwrights, he also felt that being approached by companies or individuals to collaborate has been one of the ways to become successful in writing for theatre. And although he has attended classes he “realised they were either a) earning opportunities for those giving the course, and b) ego trips for those whose works were mentioned, read, analysed and really not a lot of bloody good.” Happily though Hornby has found that his local community theatre is becoming more interested in producing original work, and he will be launching a new playwriting competition next year with Armpit Plays. But Sally McLean probably sums up the current industry the best: “On the question of the theatre industry as a whole, I believe that the theatre scene in Australia, particularly Melbourne, is thriving. Not necessarily across the board at the professional level – less funding available means less paid work – but the industry survives and survives well none-the-less. Fringe/Profit Share theatre (that predominately focuses on new work) is booming, semi-professional theatre is on the rise, and non-professional companies (otherwise known as amateur) are still going very strong – doing old favourites... This shows that all types of theatre can survive alongside each other – as audiences don’t often cross-over, and the company who knows their audience and schedules works accordingly, at affordable prices, is most likely to survive and thrive in the current climate. … I think possibly the answer lies in listening to and respecting our audiences – for, to put it simply and rather obviously, without them, we have no theatre industry.” Perhaps we really are spending too much time looking like ‘good’ writers, and not enough time looking like ‘good theatre makers’. And for all those playwrights out there – perhaps the answer lies in producing your work yourself. It might be the only way to see your work on stage. Article first published on Arts Hub - www.artshub.com.au Naomi Guss is also the Editor of The Prompt Copy - a free weekly arts industry newsletter with arts news, jobs and auditions. Go to www.freewebs.com/thepromptcopy for more information < back to Press