| Four-Day Festival of Plays and Playwrights (2) |
Theatre Event |
| New: 2014 , RWCMD , April 6, 2014 |
Richard Bean’s relationship with the film industry is frank. The writer is there to provide product. The Writers Guild made its devil’s handshake a century back- high pay for low influence. Rachel De-lahay, in demand since her 2013 “Most Promising Playwright” award, tells a tale from the industry. She has provided the pitch required but a kind of cat and mouse game develops in which the production company is shamefully coy about providing the reward for her work.Dennis Kelly, like Richard Bean, has a big popular hit to help the career along. He too did the life before the writing. “I did a big bunch of shit jobs” culminating in a hated supermarket job before finding fulfillment and expression via a youth theatre company. He brings a robust humour with him. The audience is reminded that a script can mow down any number of humans but kill a cat and there will be outrage. The Kelly plays have a stamp to them that is reflected in the views in public. The talk has shifted once to an actor who took up some television work to prepare for the work he wanted to do; “the Bill” then lasted twenty-five years. Kelly puts it bluntly: “If you compromise now you compromise for the rest of your life.” Rachel De-lahay must be a rare writer to have declined, or at least postponed, a Royal Court commission. But “Circles” at Birmingham next month needed the work to get it right. These three guests in Cardiff all convey a powerful sense of the responsibility and integrity of the writer. Bean has resisted the lure of teaching apart from an odd session at Arvon and responding to David Bond’s invitation to come to Cardiff. “Better to be poor and live off lentils” says Dennis Kelly uncompromisingly. Literary manager Chris Campbell does the host-chair role with ease and aplomb. It helps that he knows the guest authors well. It helps too that he appears to have seen everything and know everything. He knows at once Edward Albee’s stage of life when he wrote “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.?” The answer: early thirties. On dramatists seeking subject matter he knows there are at most a couple of plays to be furnished from the life. He cuts through the dramaturg-literary distinction with a scalpel finesse, elucidating en route the differences between British and Germanic theatre tradition. All the while he performs the role with a total lack of ego. While two playwrights ponder a question of difficulty he adds a rare anecdote from his former career as actor. He once walked on stage to hear an audience comment “He isn’t wearing any socks.” The observation is perfectly accurate. But what surprises is that his role has called for the absence of a great deal more clothing that just some foot coverings. “New: 2014” has had a host of supporters; the two London theatres, Paines Plough, the Richard Carne and Spielman Trusts, the Garfield Weston Foundation, all together making an initiative to be applauded. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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