REPOST- Lyndsey Turner- News from the Streets

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In the third of seven weekly writing provocations, director and 2017 Jury member Lyndsey Turner asks Bruntwood Prize playwrights to consider writing the world they know.

 

There are plays only you can write, experiences only you have had, perspectives only you have gained and communities only you know. Over the last 60 or so years, British drama has shifted away from telling stories about the type of characters who dominated the stage for the preceding 400 years, and towards work which places marginalised worlds, communities and characters at the centre of the narrative. Whether it’s the inhabitants of a sink estate, the founders of a pirate radio station, the workers in a zero hours contracts agency, the couple going through fertility treatment or the abandoned teenage sons of a wayward mother, characters about whom plays are rarely written now find their way onto our stages, and writers are increasingly bringing us ‘the news from the streets’. Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste Of Honey which follows the early life of a young Salford woman living an itinerant existence with her mother, through to her pregnancy and beyond was considered a radical gesture on its premiere in 1958. But its writer was simply writing the world she knew.

  • Which are the experiences, encounters, situations and communities which only you could bring to dramatic life on stage?
  • Who do you want to see on stage?
  • Where are the stories which connect to you personally?

 

Published on:
4 Nov 2020

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