Steve Waters, Playwriting Studies graduate turned Tutor, discusses the Playwriting Studies MRes.
It’s now 14 years since I stumbled late into a seminar room at the University of Birmingham. At the head of the table sat a stern figure in black, a look of mild disapproval on his face; I whispered to a friendly looking woman near the door: ‘Is this the MA in playwriting course?’ – she smiled wryly and said, ‘hope so – ‘cos otherwise I’m in the wrong place’. She was Sarah Kane, the man in black David Edgar, and as of September I’m returning to run the course I can honestly say changed my life.
I was teaching in schools at the time, itching to write; one day I read a speech by Arnold Wesker in The Guardian given at a conference in Birmingham which asserted the centrality of the writer to the stage. After three years of classroom drama, subjected to a relentless battery of propaganda for physical theatre and post-modern scepticism about the place of the writer in the world let alone on the stage, this came as a shock and a call to arms. The existence of a course that took seriously the separate nature of the craft of playwriting and dared to assemble a whole generation of playwrights to support that thesis seemed worth exploring further.
David Edgar established the course in 1989; it wasn’t a great time for playwrights, or plays; the Royal Court was a slightly besieged institution, the great pillars of leftist 70s drama found themselves wrong-footed by the retreat of Communism, Thatcher was still ascendant. So Edgar’s initiative felt less inevitable then than now – he’d developed the teaching of playwriting with undergraduates in the Drama department, nurturing talents such as Terry Johnson and Louise Page. And in the following ten years of his tenure the role-call of talent arriving at Birmingham New Street and sharing a balti in Balsall Heath with the wannabe playwrights is quite breathtaking – in my year alone we broke nan bread with Trevor Griffiths, Howard Brenton, David Lodge, Peter Whelan, Paula Milne, Charlotte Keatley, Sarah Daniels, Clare McIntyre, Bryony Lavery – amongst others.
David’s pedagogy was developed with Anthony Minghella – I’m still chewing over its finer meanings, and as it’s never been formulated between covers only exists in the confused memories of his protégés; but I do recall its clarity and rigour, and the elegant manner he expounded it drawing upon the entire theatrical canon to back up his ideas about set-ups and pay-offs, formats and constructs. You could resist it (I did a bit, Sarah Kane entirely) but it formed a focus to pin down the elusive ways in which all sorts of plays function. I came away more attuned to time and space, able to distinguish between inspiration (‘getting it good’) and craft (‘getting it right’). Practical workshops alternated with seminars; and given the necessarily quarrelsome and diverse nature of the playwrights, some hotfoot from lucrative careers, others fresh from University, some in their prime, some in late life, some hard as nails others all nerve-ends, the course was constantly in question, mulled over, critiqued. I think that appealed to David who from his life-long political engagements relished controversy. Mopping up all the anxieties and on the front line as our plays evolved were the tutors Richard Pinner and Clare McIntyre – they certainly earned their tiny stipends that year. Like all good educational experiences the whole was more than the sum of the parts – when we came to the end of year shows, some of us were flattered by the attention of Terry Johnson as directors, and all of us found our work thrown upon the attentions of agents, literary managers and academics, a bruising baptism indeed. But the exact effect of the course was apparent much later.
I came as someone ignorant, profoundly ignorant about theatre; I don’t even think I’d been to the Royal Court, knew nothing about Hampstead, could barely name more than five living playwrights. And in Birmingham I found myself up to my neck in the theatre. Despite three years of studying English Literature and three years of teaching I had no idea of the concrete, pugilistic qualities necessary to make professional theatre, let alone considered how writing in other media came to be. Well, I was at best a consumer not a producer. And in Birmingham I found myself amongst writers, not least my peers, who cared beyond reason and reserve about things I’d imagined my own preoccupations. I found out how little I knew and how much there was to know; and that what I thought I knew was mere theory and for the birds. All this was epitomised by my grand projet – The Pact. Yes, I had this amazing idea for a play; it wasn’t going to be hidebound by naturalism, oh no, it wasn’t going to patronise the audience, insult them by being comprehensible, it was and it wasn’t going to mean something, it was to be politically challenging and aesthetically avant-garde all at once; five acts because I was besotted with Jacobean drama; written in a sort of cod-blank verse and ultimately to be staged by Theatre de Complicite (they should be so lucky). Unfortunately my intentions were all too effectively achieved - nobody understood it; but worst than that nobody particularly cared to understand it. Finally David was brought in to deal a coup de grace to this masterpiece of political absurdism – as I expressed my fear of being ‘obvious’, he retorted ‘I don’t think that’s going to be your problem’.
I was shattered - but free, freed from shaping quixotic projects for theatres that didn’t exist; free and ready to write for the stage rather than against it. Tougher talents than mine such as Sarah’s managed to forge a new theatrical language and frighten the pants off all those around them – I’ll never forget the queasy atmosphere that attended the first staging of Blasted at the end of year presentations. Again on David’s course there might be principles, but there were no blueprints.
The other key to the MA’s ‘brand’ were the annual conferences – essentially a gathering together of the contents of David’s address book to discuss the themes of the hour; but indisputably as a body, offering some of the most important reflections on theatre practice within the last twenty years. If you glance at those seven or so conferences recorded in State of Play, noting the cast list, imagining the acrimony and seriousness of the debates, you can hear the sound of theatre talking to itself and playwrights holding the ring.
Since David the course has been fortunate in its stewards – April de Angelis and latterly Sarah Woods. Sarah herself is one of the course’s first alumni and the body of talent that’s emerged from its last fifteen years is increasingly impressive – Fraser Grace, Ben Brown, Duncan MacMillan, George Gotts, Helen Blakeman, Lucy Gough, Craig Baxter, Amy Rosenthal, Clare Bayley; not to mention writers with impressive track records in community theatre, radio, TV; dramaturgs and radio producers. And its been influential, spawning competition at Goldsmiths, at UEA and kick-starting a renaissance of writer development which was largely confined to a few producing theatres in the past.
Famously when George Devine set up the Royal Court theatre, his initial trawl for writers bore little fruit; it took years to build the writing culture that would bring on the Bonds and Ardens and others – playwriting, more than most forms of writing is as much a practice as a gift; it can wither on the vine, it can remain dormant, it can never find a form that fits the stage. I hope under my tutelage to continue a tradition of the now renamed MRes playwriting, that nurtures talent whilst investigating form; that is intellectually secure yet connected to a living culture of writing; that forms a platform for experimentation and investigation, keeping alive the idea of a play as something yet to be fully defined despite two millennia of precedent.
This month I went to Birmingham to meet my colleagues. As Sarah Woods handed on files and discs and precious anecdotes we took a detour into the basement of the Allardyce Nicholl studio, the soon to be abandoned theatre where all our plays first met their audience. There, gathering dust on the shelves amongst reel to reel tapes of past conferences were boxes of plays laid out year by year. I went eagerly to 1993, blew the dust off the top to see a top copy of Blasted there, sound cues in felt-tip on the type-written text. I put it back in its box – it remains there as a totem and a challenge.
Roll on the autumn term.