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Daring Pairing festival manager Corinne Salisbury and Neil Crutchfield with the typewriter at Hampstead Theatre |
Theatre invites public to type-cast!
Budding playwrights urged to contribute to play as part of a celebration of collaborations
WE’VE all enjoyed the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Gilbert and Sullivan. Now steel yourself for the next big thing in writing credits, because a new play-writing team is in town: you lot!
Hampstead Theatre, in Swiss Cottage, this week launched their new writing festival called Daring Pairing – and hope to set a world record for the number of contributors to a single play by asking anyone who fancies themselves as a bit of a bard to scrawl a few lines. Like a giant game of consequences, anyone can offer a sentence or two, and the final product will be staged at the theatre using well-known actors.
Hampstead literary manager Neil Crutchfield said: “This festival is all about unusual collaborations.
“We have a team of great writers on board whose styles would best be described as different to one another.
“We decided we’d open it up to all.”
A typewriter has been placed in the theatre’s foyer for anyone who fancies penning a line or offering stage directions to pop in. There is also a Twitter account for people who want to offer 140 characters of suspense, and a website too.
Mr Crutchfield added: “This will be a lot of fun. We want to show that anyone can write a play – it is all about experimenting. And no one can guess how the story will finish.”
Mr Crutchfield said his own playwrights dream-team would consist of contemporary absurdist writer Martin Crim, and Ancient Greek chronicler Euripides.
He added: “They’d argue a lot – but you’d get something totally amazing!”
As well as the amateur efforts, the festival boasts unlikely collaborations chosen by the theatre. The writers, including April De Angelis, Molly Davies and Joel Horwood, will be paired with artists from drama groups The Factory, Nabokov, and Heat&Light alongside students from Central School of Speech and Drama. The results will be showcased in a series of late-night scratch performances and impromptu events throughout the two weeks.
Double act Right partner?
SO, who would be your in your theatre-writing dream team? We asked four experts:
Fitzrovia actor Griff Rhys Jones said he would like to see a play written by George Bernard Shaw with the help of American screenwriter, director, playwright and novelist Ben Hect. “Shaw could write something opinionated, and then we could rely on Hect to polish it up,” he said.
The Observer’s theatre critic Susannah Clapp, who lives in Bloomsbury, said her dream team would consist of Ben Jonson, the English renaissance playwright, teamed up with Lucy Prebble, behind the Secret Diary of a Call Girl and the latest hit, Enron. She said: “Both are scabrous analysers of the way money rots society.”
Brian Daniels, artistic director at the New End Theatre in Hampstead, would like to see Charles Dickens teamed up with Cameron Macintosh. He said: “I wonder what their take on Bleak House would have been?” He also admitted that he’d like to see Tony Blair have a stab at writing.
“I’d be interested to see Blair writing on the Iraq war. He could team up with Tim Burton – that would be a nightmarish scenario.”
Hampstead author Deborah Moggach said: “Writing is so lonely. I would like to work with Armando Iannucci, because he’s got the quickest wits in the business. It would be fun. I think a good collaborator complements you – not compliments, though this would be nice.” |
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