Back young playwrights – they are theatre's lifeblood

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/23/bruntwood-prize-young-playwrights

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When I was a young girl, growing up in Yorkshire, and newly passionate about the theatre, there was no shortage of contemporary drama to inform, educate and entertain me and raise my consciousness of the brave, new postwar world into which I had been born.

I gobbled up Pinter, Osborne, Beckett and Delaney and travelled miles from Barnsley to see whatever was on offer at Sheffield Playhouse, Nottingham, even London. There was Ibsen, Albee, Miller. I'll never forget the impact of Leonard Rossiter in Brecht's Arturo Ui or, later, that heartstopping moment when Caryl Churchill's Top Girls took London by storm. It was theatre that made me think about politics, sexual and otherwise, and opened my mind to myriad ideas.

Then came the Theatre Review of 2001, which followed the Boyden investigation into regional productions, provoking anxiety that new writing was no longer a priority. Theatres were falling back on the classics or the easy entertainment value of the musical to put bums on seats. There was a short revival which gave opportunities to writers such as Simon Stephens Moira Buffini, Abi Morgan and David Eldridge, but it was a short-lived honeymoon.

The financial crash of 2008 brought back that sense of nervousness and new, challenging work failed to find a home. The 2012 In Battalions report by Fin Kennedy found clear evidence that work by new, untried writers was, yet again, a casualty of the cuts in spending on the arts.

Hence my delight by what I've seen as chair of this year's Bruntwood prize, which began in 2005, funded by a large Manchester company in conjunction with the city's Royal Exchange theatre. Its aim was to give an opportunity to such writers to have their work read, assessed and performed.

Previous winners of the prize, awarded in 2005, 2008 and 2011, have put paid to the idea that new work won't fill a theatre. Duncan Macmillan's adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four has been one of the most produced plays in Europe. It has sold out on a tour of the UK and will go to London next year. Vivienne Franzmann, the winner in 2008, has a new play, Pests, which will be co-produced by the Royal Exchange, Clean Break and the Royal Court next year.

I was amazed at the quality of the 10 plays on this year's shortlist. The themes covered subjects as diverse as the plight of damaged and neglected children leaving care in this country, homosexuality and religion in Uganda and falling in love with someone of the wrong class in North Korea.

The winning play, Anna Jordan's Yen, is about two teenage brothers who live alone with their dog, Taliban. Their drunken mother passes out on the doorstep occasionally and they spend their time watching pornography and playing video games with disastrous consequences for the young girl, Jenny, who strays into their world.

It is truly a play for today and, given that more than 150,000 people have already seen Bruntwood-winning plays, there is no doubt it, and probably the other plays that were commended by the judges, will find an audience.

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