A Culture of Development: The Royal Court and the Young Writers’ Programme

In playwright Gregory Motton’s introduction to his August Strindberg translations, he sharply criticises the way in which the British new writing industry finds and develops its playwrights. “Witness,” he writes,

the plethora of ‘help’ groups for writers, and theatres’ doctrine of developing young writers (ones they can discover and control). Believe it or not, this goes so far as to include developing sets of ‘rules’ by which play writing ought to be governed. If this sounds like something from a long-forgotten past let me tell you I have seen those rules written on a whiteboard at the Young Writers group at the prominent London theatre that dubs itself ‘The Writers’ Theatre’ (run by directors of course).

(Motton 16–17)

The theatre Motton refers to here is the Royal Court, and the “help group” in question is the Young Writers’ Programme. This support and development group for playwrights aged between eighteen and twenty-five has existed in its current form since 1998, when previous Artistic Director Ian Rickson renamed the Young People’s Theatre the Young Writers’ Programme and moved its focus entirely to playwriting, placing it under the leadership of Ola Animashawun. This reflected a gradual shift that had been taking place in the programme throughout the 1990s, as under Dominic Tickell and later Carl Miller it increasingly moved its emphasis away from other theatre artists and towards writers. The Young People’s Theatre itself had existed in some form ever since 1970 and the first Young Writers’ Festival was initiated in 1974, after which it returned sporadically before being established as a regular biennial event from 1994. The focus of the Young People’s Theatre had been distributed across all areas of theatre-making, but when the Royal Court moved to the West End during its renovation in the late 1990s Miller insisted that the programme for young writers should become a core activity for the theatre (Little & McLaughlin 133–136; 377–381). The subsequent establishment of a dedicated playwriting programme in many ways cemented the Royal Court’s identity as, in Motton’s words, “The Writers’ Theatre”, demonstrating a commitment to both discovering and nurturing new talent.

Motton’s criticisms of such programmes begin to illuminate some of the potential problems posed by the Young Writers’ Programme. His concern for this and similar initiatives is that if theatre managements impose a certain structure for writing plays, “then we must expect writing styles that fail to serve what is being expressed” (Motton 17–18). The persistent fear for any programme that attempts to teach playwriting is that it will simply instruct students in how to write a particular type of play – in this case, the mythologized “Royal Court Play”. The other fear, also expressed by Motton, is that this process of development somehow diminishes the voice of the writer and brings them under the influence of other creative figures, thereby undermining the authorial power of the playwright that the Royal Court has traditionally sought to enshrine. By looking at the evolution of the Young Writers’ Programme since 1998, and with a particular focus on its positioning as a key strand of new play development during Dominic Cooke’s tenure as Artistic Director, this article will investigate what influence the Programme has had on the status of the playwright within the theatre and on the development culture of the Royal Court. Beyond Sloane Square, meanwhile, these findings have further implications for the new writing industry as a whole and for trends in play development throughout British theatre, which this article will begin to explore.

In a 2013 newspaper article for The Observer surveying Cooke’s legacy as Artistic Director, Kate Kellaway suggests that “what makes Cooke’s reign unique is that he has used the Royal Court’s young writers programme as a way of finding and cultivating new talent . . . if a play was good enough, that was enough: he would put it on” (Kellaway). Before Cooke’s arrival in 2007, the work of playwrights coming through the Young Writers’ Programme was largely restricted to the Young Writers’ Festival and...