Award-winning playwright and director John Retallack (above, in session) launched his Oxford Playwriting School in 2017. As he looks ahead to its second year, I asked him what had worked best in training a new generation of playwrights, what the challenges had been, and what he was looking forward to with the class of 2018-19.
What do you think has worked best on the course?
I was clear from the outset that I am primarily a ‘coach’ – I help writers to find what they want to say, how they want to say it and who they want to say it for.
The two groups of eight writers were interesting people and they made stimulating ‘ensembles’. They really helped and cared for each other. The youngest writer that I had last year was 19 and the oldest was 70. This year I have launched subsidised bursaries that make the course available at 50% of the fee to two writers under 25. One is taken and one is still open.
The course takes place every week over nine months. As a result, each member of the group wrote three distinct and separate pieces, including a full-length play. This regularity focused us all – everyone kept writing throughout the year, knowing that they had a group to share it with.
We all enjoyed reading contemporary work and seeing it performed – these plays became our reference points. Over the nine months, we read 15 contemporary plays, from Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott to Gill’s The York Realist, from Raine’s Tribes to Zeller’s The Truth, from Franzmann’s Mogadishu to Churchill’s Top Girls.
The course happens in a beautiful room in the centre of Oxford that we use both for our weekly sessions and also for our Performance Workshops. This space is home for the writers and it is a place that they can stay and socialize in after the session. I think that this space has contributed positively to the overall experience.
What breakthroughs have people had and where has development of people’s work been challenging?
One young writer experienced a serious block with a play and just didn’t know how to proceed – what was as important as my own advice was the support and faith of the other writers in the room.
This writer did finish the play in question and it was worth the wait. Of course, everyone said how hard it is to write a play! The Royal Court Playwrights Podcasts are illuminating in this regard. David Hare says something along the lines of ‘any fool can start a play but you have to be genuinely smart to finish one’.
Another gifted writer worked as a paediatrician by day and wrote plays by night – what vexed her was whether to write about her ‘real life’ (often very demanding and tough) or whether to ‘escape’ to other worlds in her dramatic writing.
In the end, she wrote a fine work-place drama in which she explored issues that could not be raised at work. Another writer, after some false starts, discovered that she had an uncannily accurate recall of the language and culture of the country she grew up in some 50 years ago – and wrote a brilliant (and very funny) political drama set in Dungannon at the time of the first Civil Rights marches.
What it’s like to work with a range of experiences in the room?
A range of experience is clearly desirable. There are also certain qualities that one wants all the writers to have; an ability to listen well as much as to talk well, a real burn to write (and finish) a play – and an engagement with the world at large.
How have the writers built their ideas through collaboration?
I have found both groups of writers to be conscientious in reading the work of their fellow writers before a session. This has proved invaluable to everyone involved.
There are also some excellent actors, based in Oxford, who have performed in all three of the Performance Workshops. As a result, they have got to know the writers well and are uniquely placed to articulate their reactions to plays as they develop over the year.
Next year, we will have an ‘in camera’ session with just the actors and the writers.
What you might shift or change in this coming year of the course?
All sessions will be two and a half hours, rather than two – that proved to be a ‘natural’ length for each session, with a short break in the middle. And I will try to make the end-of-year Performance Workshop an event to which we invite the public – we had over forty for the last two sessions this year and we can build on that for next year.
I love teaching this course. That has been the main revelation for me. And it’s got me writing – Hannah and Hanna in Dreamland opens at The Marlowe in Canterbury on October 1st.
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