Thinking spaces: Inside the Royal Court's International Department
Thinking spaces: Inside the Royal Court's International Department
A look at the work the Royal Court does to support writers around the world.
Welcome to Café Europa, a weekly newsletter dedicated to European theatre.
Like many organisations. the Royal Court – arguably the UK’s leading new writing theatre - is currently in a difficult position, struggling with the double impact of the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis and, as reported in The Stage, may have to make redundancies as it attempts to secure its future.
Earlier this year I spoke to two of the writers who were being developed via the Royal Court’s international department about their experiences. I thought it would be illuminating to explore this more under-the-radar aspect of the Royal Court’s work and the support it offers writers from across the world, its commitment to nurturing new writers wherever they live and in whatever language they write. And it feels like now it’s even more important to talk about this.
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Between 10th and 21st January this year, London’s Royal Court hosted a series of readings and performances of plays by writers from Barbados, Brazil, Jamaica, Mexico and the Philippines. All of the work had been developed through the Royal Court’s International Department.
International work has been central to the Royal Court since George Devine’s time – he wanted international work to have a presence on the London stage. The international department at the Royal Court was founded in 1996. For years it was run by the formidable Elyse Dodgson, who passed away in 2018 (playwright April de Angelis movingly remembers her here). Over the years she forged relationships with writers in over 70 countries including India, Uganda, Chile, Nigeria, Peru, Syria, Mexico, Cuba, Palestine, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Russia, Ukraine, China, Lebanon and the Middle East (you can hear her talking about her work in this region in this edition of Theatre Voice). Dodgson saw the process of creative development as mutually beneficial. “It also offers us ways of making theatre that we wouldn’t necessarily otherwise see, and that can be hugely beneficial to playwrights and theatre artists here,” she said in an interview about the theatre’s relationship with its Palestinian writers.
As international director she produced major productions such as Vassily Sigarev’s Plasticine, Natal’ya Vorozhbit’s Bad Roads, a play about Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea and Donbas, and Dalia Taha’s Fireworks, as well as My Name Is Rachel Corrie, Katharine Viner and Alan Rickman’s play based on the writings of the young American protester killed by an Israeli military bulldozer in Gaza in 2003.
More recent productions include Chilean playwright Pablo Manzi’s A Fight Against (Una Lucha Contra), a play developed on a residency at the Royal Court, Abhishek Majumdar’s Pah-La, produced by the Court in 2019 and set in a remote Tibetan village, which the Guardian’s Michael Billington described as “a philosophical inquiry into the nature of non-violence and the tactics required to counter oppression,” (Majumdar describes his research process for this play here) and Goats, by Syrian playwright Liwaa Yazji which featured a stage full of actual goats who clopped around the set, amiably interacting with their human co-stars, and occasionally attempting to eat the props.
According to Sam Pritchard, who is currently the International Associate Director at the Royal Court, the theatre’s mission is “to develop relationships with and to support the most exciting people making work in theatre, wherever they might happen to be whatever language they might be working in.” They do this in a variety of ways, via writers’ residencies and writers’ groups. “The groups we've run internationally, to my mind have always worked best when they are a parallel endeavour to the work that we do with writers in the UK,” says Pritchard.
“We’re interested in the relationship with the writer beyond the single play,” he stresses, citing Vorozhbyt as a prime example. Since the Royal Court started working with her, that relationship has continued to develop, over a number of projects. “it always has to be the case that we're engaging in activity with writers with the ambition that there might be work that we put on stage, I feel like the selfishness of that motivation, keeps the exchange really clear, the intention pure and it keeps the artistic exchange honest. Because otherwise, why do it?”
Building these international relationships takes time, he says. Partnerships have to be forged, funding needs to be sourced. “We’re always in about four or five other conversations about where we might be able to work, and how funding might come together to allow us to work in a particular part of the world.”
International development has to be a genuine process of exchange, Pritchard stresses. it can’t just be about exporting a Royal Court model, the process has to be open to all the ways in which you can craft a play. “There is no default. There has to be a really conscious exploration of work from a whole range of different dramaturgical traditions. The process cannot just be taking a range of work that's been written and made in the UK, whether it's books, or film versions of shows, and using that as an implicit model.”
The work which Dodgson started, continued after her death. In 2019, the Royal Court began its first ever workshop group in Japan. Fifteen playwrights from across Japan took part in a series of three intensive workshops, working with Pritchard, Literary Manager Jane Fallowfield, the playwright Alistair McDowall and Japanese playwright Tomohiro Maekawa. The writers were supported in the development of a new play, which were eventually presented as part of New Plays: Japan in early 2023.
The Royal Court also has schemes underway in the Philippines, Brazil, in Mexico - where they have a longstanding relationship dating back to Dodgson’s time - and the Caribbean,, the latter a result a partnership with Edna Manley College, one of the leading performing arts institutions in Kingston, the University of the West Indies Cave Hill, and the Trinidad and Tobago Drama Association. “There was a really brilliant effort by the artists facilitating this work to have a huge range of different visiting artists from across the Caribbean,” says Pritchard.
In 2019, the writer debbie tucker green and the director Anthony Simpson Pike set up a research trip to Jamaica, and Barbados, where they spent time “talking to artists, meeting companies, and reflecting a little bit of on what a project like this would need to be and what the challenges were for writers.” A writers’ group was established and a call-out was made for submissions. “These groups are always an opportunity for broad reflection about dramaturgy. They’re thinking spaces,” says Pritchard.
How does this process work in practice? Michaela Spencer, a Jamaican writer with a background in filmmaking, was one of those who responded to the call-out for writers, as was Jherad Alleyne, who had been performing stand-up in Toronto before he returned home to Barbados during the pandemic. “I wanted to keep working, but there’s not really a stand-up comedy scene in Barbados, And I love plays, so I started writing a play.” Alleyne’s mum’s friend saw the call-out for submissions and urged his mum to get him to apply. One of the most impactful parts of the process was getting to read a variety of plays, to expand their ideas of what theatre could be. For Alleyne it was Tarrel Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size that really fired him up. “That really opened up something for me.”
Having Caribbean writers running the course was helpful too, says Spencer, “because we can relate to them a lot more.” They were more familiar with the issues they wanted to discuss in their plays and were able to “offer lot of advice on how to develop my story, especially in terms of the setting.”
Spencer lives in “the tourist belt” of Jamaica and ended up writing Cabin Fever, a play about the impact of tourism and the hotel industry on the region. “I really wanted to tell some of those stories.” The writers group helped her to develop and express her ideas, “because I know what I am saying in my head but I needed to find a way to get it across to other people.”
Alleyne describes his play, Scam-uh-Life, as being about the feeling that “as soon as you take a couple steps forward something pulls you back.” It’s something he’d heard a lot of people saying in a lot of situations, and “I wanted to try to see if I could reflect that back to the audience.” For him, writing this play has also been an exercise in form and the use of metaphor, trying to convey a concept without “beating people over the head.”
The final step of the process for the participants in the writers’ group was for the plays to be presented on stage at the Royal Court. Both Spencer and Alleyne came to the UK for their readings. Spencer‘s play was due to be directed by Rebakah Murrell, Alleyne’s play by Emily Aboud, who he’d first met via Zoom and was looking forward to meeting in person, having enjoyed hearing “her opinion on how the writing impacted her as a director.” It helps that she’s from Trinidad, he says, because she has a better grasp of the cultural context than someone from a different background might have. “I've always been interested in what translates between all these places,” he says, what will be understood in a Caribbean context and what will translate to a London audience. When we spoke in January, they were just about to begin rehearsals and he was interested to discover how his play would connect with a UK audience. What situations will people recognise? What jokes will people get?
“Honestly I didn't think a lot of it would translate to London because to my mind so much of it is specific to Barbados, so I'm looking forward to seeing what does and does not translate,” he says.
Alleyne talks with admiration about the Royal Court’s mission to support and develop new writing, to keep producing work even if not all of it is guaranteed to succeed. ”That resonated with me in a deep way. I wish there was something like it in Barbados.”
During the workshops they had discussed the fact that a lot of the writing that is being produced in the Caribbean is very comedic in tone because “that’s what audiences tend to go and see,” says Spencer. “In Barbados if you want playwriting to make sense financially you better tell a joke,” Alleyne agrees, laughing. “You’re constantly having to ask yourself how do I get this audience to engage?”
The work he’s most interested in writing, and which he’s used the programme to explore, is work that straddles the line between comedy and drama. Spencer also welcomes the opportunity to explore different modes of writing. “For writers like me who want to write drama, who want to write tragedy, there aren’t that many spaces for that in Jamaica. To be here and not feel pressured to be anything but myself is pretty cool.”
Alleyne is looking forward to his time in London, where he hopes to see as much work as he can and discover “what kind of stuff writers in the UK are trying to ask and answer.” He’s still pleasantly awed by the fact that he has had the opportunity to go, first to Jamaica (though this was scuppered by the Caribbean Airways strike), and then to London as part of the scheme. “To get to go somewhere because of some words that I wrote on a page is amazing to me,” he says. It gives him the motivation to keep writing, to keep honing his craft. “These opportunities don’t exist in the Caribbean. I’m so glad the Royal Court is doing this.”
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