During this public health emergency, the safety and wellbeing of our staff, artists, audiences and families comes first.
We are exploring ways in which we can all remain connected and optimistic. The Bruntwood Prize has always been about much more than the winners. It is about opening up playwriting to anyone and everyone, to support anyone interested in playwriting to explore the unique power of creative expression. Therefore we want to make this website a resource now for anyone and everyone to explore theatre and plays and playwriting.
So we will be highlighting the many different resources archived on this website over the coming weeks.
For the bank holiday weekend- we have permission to share playwright Eve Leigh’s brilliant Workshop for the Digital Body- originally shared on twitter. Eve was shortlisted for the Bruntwood Prize in 2019 for her play SALTY IRINA
A question. Who are your favourite playwrights/theatremakers?. A little reminder that not everyone is alive; not everyone is dead; not everyone works in English.
OK, we know each other’s taste a little bit now. Let’s start with some free writing. Set a timer for 5 minutes. Don’t stop writing at all during that time. The writing can be nonsense. Doesn’t matter at all. Just don’t stop.
Watch this:
Right, we watched that. Did you like it? Did you hate it? What about it did you enjoy or not? Don’t forget to keep it really simple in your responses. The dumber the better tbh. “I didn’t like that it was a competition.” “I like shiny jackets.” “I don’t like the colour red. Just observe yourself responding to it. Whatever you liked or didn’t like. To quote the beautiful Adrian Howells, it’s all allowed. For more info on him:
Me, I like that it’s incredibly silly and incredibly serious at the same time. I like Whitney Houston. I like the escalations. I like that it’s a weird sport, so it makes me think about how all sport is weird. I like the way it plays with gender. I like how powerful they look.
Oftentimes when you’re trying to put a piece of theatre together, you’re trying to be clever. IMHO this is the opposite of what you should do. Be a weird dumb sensory creature. Be really alive to your own tastes. I believe this enables us to make work that is more distinctive.
We’re returning to automatic writing now. Set a timer for 15 minutes this time. Write a list of things you enjoy in art. Music you love. The feeling of being in competition. The feeling of being in community. Moments in films/music/games/whatever that meant something to you.
It should start as a list. It’s probably not gonna stay a list. That’s good too.
Read what you have written. This is the beginning of your manifesto. That document – the stuff that YOU actually think is important and meaningful – that’s a huge part of what you have to give to the world.
(Read/watch probably everything on this website tbh)
“What is the RITUAL and how is it SUBVERTED and DISRUPTED? The best scenes have an immediately recognisable structure which is then disrupted – wedding/funeral/driving test/first date/visit to the vets etc. What are our expectations and how are we surprised?”
BAM! This is the real shit. Let’s make a list of rituals for us all in the replies to this tweet. You can make such cool stuff just by taking the idea of an event, or a clichéd conversation, and turning it upside down. Appropriately enough, the best example I know of this is the final scene of Duncan’s play PEOPLE PLACES AND THINGS. SAVAGE and so brilliant.
Ok, time to shake it out. Have a little dance party wherever you are. Here’s my contribution to the playlist:
Read this. It contains a bunch of links to FREE THEATRE you can watch online:
Let Audre Lorde ask you some questions. PLEASE feel free to answer quickly and instinctively. PLEASE feel free to take your time and consider. PLEASE consider that you may not yet have an answer.
Let John Cage tell you some shit.
Those two lists are honestly like being sponsored to become a radical by Audre Lorde and an artist by John Cage. Consider doing everything you can to take them to heart. Sponsored in the AA sense. Like “this is how you do it.”
But also! It may not be possible to do as much of either as you would like right now. I’m thinking in particular of people at the intersections of poverty and disability who perhaps cannot “come or go to everything”. That is more than OK.
Even a second that you’re able to win for yourself, for your creativity, in a single day, begins to add up. Please try not to “make perfect the enemy of good.” The way I often think about it is that making art (and, G!d forbid, trying to make a living from art) is like being in a dark forest. The pathway only becomes visible bit by bit. If you’re thrashing around checking everyone else’s progress you will probably miss your path. Try and be patient and look for the glimmers showing you the way. The first time I talked about that forest publicly, it was on this podcast, which is free, chock-full of brilliant theatre minds, and amazing https://chrisgoodeandco.podbean.com/
Here’s an offer. [Character 1] [commits violence] towards [Character 2] in front of [Character 3]. Set that timer for 1 hour, and fill in the blanks.
Come up with as many different reasons as possible why Character 1 did what they did. What form did the violence take? (Look back at Macmillan. Maybe it takes a very unexpected form.) How do Characters 2 and 3 react? Who are they all?
(Expected vs unexpected forms of violence make me think of this article Yeah, I LOVE lists.)
Break up all that reading and writing! See what looks interesting to you on THIS, the Youtube channel of one of the most important avant-garde theatres in the world: https://www.youtube.com/user/321HAU/videos
So what are some tools to build a new kind of story, and not make it boring? I’m gonna get really boneheaded and technical here and try and give you tools you can actually use.Here’s one: time. We don’t get impatient listening to a well-told traditional story because we can sense where the end is coming. If you want to get really wild and nonlinear, a trick to keep the audience with you is to put a clock on it.
An example of this is the scene countdown in Pornography by Simon Stephens. We don’t know when the play is ending. It’s completely nonlinear. But we know, without being told as such, that we are moving down to 1 (or possibly zero I guess).
You can really have fun with this. Random example: protagonist runs after a rabbit that is saying “oh dear, I shall be too late!” Has a million adventures unrelated to rabbit. But we know in the end the goal is to both explore Wonderland and get home. This is a way of having your cake and eating it – getting really freaky (hello, Alice in Wonderland) and making the quest essentially a McGuffin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin) to explore what you want to explore/avoid what you want to avoid.
Here’s another trick. If you’ve made it this far in the thread you are surely aware of the truism “drama is conflict,” yes?
I very much hated this saying until Chris Goode brought me enlightenment. He pointed out that we normally think of conflict as an argument between two characters. But a whole range of possibilities open to us when we consider *formal* or *tonal* conflict.
An example: the performance piece TORYCORE by @Llifo and Chris Thorpe [I regret I cannot remember who the other guy is]. This is a metal band all of whose lyrics are made up of speeches by high-up Tories. It’s actually less of a tonal contrast than you might think tbh -but it is a formal conflict. A lot of what allows the shock of the rhetoric to penetrate is the contrast between the civilised violence of the words and the raw scream of the music.
We hear it differently, because it’s put in a different context. Right?
Again, set a timer. Five minutes this time. Write down some of the formal and tonal contrasts in the story.
Once you’ve done that, make a plan to adapt it for the stage. Something about beginning writers, especially of an experimental bent, is that we like to get directors and designers in trouble with our stage directions.
I personally think this is one of our most adorable qualities, but for the purposes of this exercise, try and have a practical solution to every effect you put on stage. Don’t offer it in the draft. But have it in your head. Give yourself half an hour to make that offer. We’re near the end now.
OK, this is my final bit of knucklehead alt-theatre dramaturgy for this workshop. Find the stupidest, most literal metaphor for the problem you’re trying to write about, and commit to it 100%.Example: Pomona by Ali MacDowell (almost anything by him tbh, he’s amazing at this). Pomona is a play about how there’s a hole in the middle of the city, how the void at the heart of capitalism is tearing us apart. So, SPOILER ALERT it’s a play about how there’s a hole at the centre of Manchester and in that hole there are organ harvesters. Just commit to it! Say what you want to say, in the absolute simplest way, and commit to it 100%! really think that human behaviour is so complicated, and our perceptions of reality are so off-the-chain weird, that the most compelling plays usually keep everything else simple. This is, if anything, MORE true of weird art than more classic art.
Anyway. Thanks very much to anyone who might have completed this workshop. Something wonderful to see you out:
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