All Change Please by Kerbel Lucy;

Author:Kerbel, Lucy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nick Hern Books, Limited

Expanding our tastes – and our minds

If we can become broader-minded about what excellent theatre can be, the possibilities are endless and exciting: we will have expanded the repertoire immeasurably; ensured a greater diversity of work for our audiences to experience; made space for a wider range of stories and perspectives to challenge and inspire us; opened up to new ideas and ways of thinking about the world coming into our rehearsal rooms and offices, as well as on to our stages. It could lead to us entirely rethinking the models around how we make theatre, and what that theatre looks like and says both to and about the world. It could be the springboard for one of the most exciting artistic revolutions theatre has ever known.

At the very least, it would be a wonderful learning opportunity. To speak from personal experience, I know that going through the process of conducting the research for my first book, 100 Great Plays for Women, broadened my own theatrical horizons significantly, along with my conception of what dramatic writing can be and do. The activity, which the research forced me to do, of reading plays that fell outside my pre-existing sphere of knowledge, or that I may have considered outside of my tastes, or which I probably wouldn’t otherwise have read because for whatever reason I didn’t consider them relevant to me, was a huge learning curve. Despite having previously considered myself very well read – and indeed, for years I’d been tearing through plays almost compulsively – I discovered there was a far broader range of material out there than I’d known about – because while I’d been reading lots of plays, they often tended to be the same kinds of plays. My goal with 100 Great Plays for Women was to assemble a purposefully eclectic range of works for many different tastes, and as part of that I had to be able to articulate what made each of them worthy of the title ‘great’. To do this I had to take time to understand why others may love them, even if I, on initial reading, didn’t. As it was, taking the time to do so meant I ended up falling in love with those plays myself.

I’ll finish this section with a conversation I had with a playwright a few years ago. I was interviewing him as part of a research study Tonic was doing at the time into opportunities for girls taking part in youth drama, with a particular focus on the type of roles available to them. The writer was musing over the differences between writing male and female characters in view of how we currently think of drama. He told me about having been commissioned a few years earlier to write two parallel monologues for young audiences, one to be performed by the character of a teenage boy, the other by the character of a teenage girl. The boy’s monologue, he said, he found far more straightforward to write.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.