News

This week the Tobacco Factory Theatre’s director, Ali Robertson, writes about the important role Script Space plays in helping us support and promote the best new writers of the future.

We produce very few of the shows that play at the Tobacco Factory. We produce a Christmas show every year, but some years that’s it: all the other shows in both our theatres are produced by visiting companies. However, I’ve always taken it as fundamentally important that we support all levels of the creative process as much as we can. Over the last few years we have introduced four different development strands and, although it’ll be another year or two before we are in a position to increase significantly the amount of in-house production that we do, we are proud that these development strands have led to a lot of shows happening that might not have done otherwise.

One of the development strands is, of course, Script Space, which is now in its fourth year. The dates for Script Space have been the same for the last few years and for me the first significant one is the closing date in January. As it approaches I contact Sophie steadily more regularly, saying, “has anyone entered yet?”, “has anyone entered yet?”, always believing that this will be the year that it will be greeted with widespread disinterest. Fortunately it’s been the same every year thus far: a trickle of scripts turns into a flood and, during the final week, an enormous deluge. Sophie then goes very quiet for a few weeks as she works her way through hundreds of scripts and reduces them to a long-list of sixty or so by March. At this point she re-appears, now surrounded by readers, in the theatre foyer and over a few days they whittle this list down and down until there are no more than ten particularly promising scripts on the short-list. In theory I stay out of it until the shortlist arrives, at which point Morgan, Carrie, Sophie and I take the ten scripts, read and re-read them and agree the small handful of ‘winners’. However, every year we all do tend to hang around in the foyer with our ears pricked trying to work out if there’s a sniff of anything especially special this time.

In previous years the top few plays have received rehearsed readings. I’ve been pleased with the standard of these: we’ve worked with very good directors and actors and I think the readings have been really useful to some of the plays. However, this year we have acknowledged that not all plays submitted always benefit from a rehearsed reading and we will take a rather different approach. In partnership with the Festival of Ideas we hope to be able to provide tailored support to the winning scripts. For some this might still be a rehearsed reading, but for others it might be dramaturgical support, full production of a micro-play as a curtain-raiser during the season or something else. The support we give all depends on the scripts we receive, so I presume that I will have my ears extra-pricked during the short-listing this March in the hope that out of the 360 submissions we are able to discover, and provide real help to, some absolute gems.