Some prizes are better than others…
A few thoughts (none of them original…)
At midday on the 13th May What’s On Stage announced their ‘Lockdown Playwriting Prize’ – There was a line up of judges who many aspiring and emerging playwrights would love to have read their work, and the opportunity to forever call themselves an ‘award winning playwright’ would be nice, right?
The catch? There were a couple: The play had to be about quarantine (ie written now, with a very specific title), it had to be 60 – 90 minutes and a deadline of the 30th June. That gives playwrights just 6 weeks to write a full length play. And the reward? One performance at the Turbine Theatre and £500. No, I didn’t miss a zero off the end…
Let’s get the prickly subject of money out of the way first. £500 is not a great deal of money. If you spent the next 6 weeks solidly writing (and you’d probably have to!) to get to the word count required for a full length play that would equate to £83.33 per week. That’s if you win. And if you win, there’d be re-writes (there are always re-writes). Then there are rehearsals for the 1 performance (why only 1 performance?) – I would always advise writers to spend some time in the rehearsal room. This is where you do your learning – and you should never stop learning – and also where you can see if the thing is working – if it isn’t that means more re-writes… do you see where I’m going? And I’ve not even added in travel costs etc (we don’t all live in London…. Gasp! Shock horror! The provinces? Never!).
There is a reason ITC sets rates for the writing of a play. At the time of writing they advise that a play between 30 and 70 minutes should command a fee of at least £6110, and for over 70 minutes £9176.
But it’s a prize!
Sure, sure. And that was noted: Theatre twitter didn’t exactly pile on – there was reasoned discussion about time frames, effort and prize fund. People discussed parameters: how about shorter plays? Treatments? Pitches? Allowing pre-written plays into the mix? We’re nothing if not a creative bunch of problem solvers! Less than 2 hours after their initial announcement, What’s on Stage (a subsidiary company owned by Theatre Mania NYC) rather than fully take on board the feedback about parameters etc, pulled the plug.
Are prizes problematic by their very nature?
Yes. And no.
Commissions will always be better than the lottery of a prize, but when you start out it can feel like all the doors are closed to you. Many theatres just aren’t producing houses, those that are mostly won’t take unsolicited scripts, if they do, they have very short submission windows, many say that they want to see your work before even considering working with you (which can feel like a Catch-22 type kick in the teeth). So, an open submission with the possibility of any prize money feels like an opportunity.
Some prizes are better than others.
So you’ve brushed off that script, you’ve written another draft, you’ve edited it, you may even have asked some friends to do a table read, a little feedback. You send it in. And that’s it. What then? Wait for the notification that you’ve been longlisted/shortlisted/won?
For the *big prizes there is a lot of competition: Over **1000 entered the Nick Darke Award 2018, 1017 for the Women’s Prize for Playwriting in its inaugural year, 1406 entered the Papatango prize in 2019, and for the biggest hitter, the Bruntwood Prize 2019, 2561. It is, to some extent, a numbers game. It’s definitely not something you can really on if you’re determined to have a career as a playwright. This sounds like I’m saying don’t enter. That’s not what I’m saying at all. The Bruntwood Prize provides more than just the Prize. For a start they acknowledge the huge effort it takes for anyone to put pen to paper; they provide online workshops by some of the best playwrights/theatre makers; they give feedback to 100 longlisters and continue to offer a platform and promote their work; they develop relationships with the 15 shortlisted writers that extends far beyond the Prize. Absolutely put your work in, but please don’t put your eggs only in these particular baskets. If you want to write, or make – then do that. Get your work out, get your mates to read your scenes, film them, send your scripts/films to every theatre or theatre company whose work you like. If you like someone’s work, tell them – if you think they’d like your work invite them to see yours. Work together. Talk. Play. Theatre is a collaborative process. It is not a lottery.
Oh, and those prizes where you have to pay to submit? NO! JUST…. NO!
That’s just my tupenny-worth (literally)
*’big’ = prize money that’s somewhere near the ITC rate for a play…
**anecdotal numbers from a reader. Exact number of submissions unpublished.