Elyse Dodgson - Interviews at the ROYAL COURT THEATRE

Introduces a New Series of International Plays at the Royal Court

Two years ago, the Royal Court Theatre found the play that won the Evening Standard Award for the most promising newcomer. This year, in a new International Playwrights season , several more new plays are being seen. Contributions are coming from Brazil, Russia again - and, astonishingly perhaps, Cuba. Elyse Dodgson runs the International Department that pulls off these miracles - and whose work is refreshing and stimulating new theatre all over the globe. Mel Cooper met with her at the Royal Court Theatre just as the new season was getting underway.

Elyse Dodgson has a smile that can only find competition these days in Diane Keaton's beam when she is at her happiest in Something's Gotta Give. It is the smile of a person deeply happy about her job and her life. I met with her in what is now the conference room of the International Department on the second floor of the Royal Court Theatre in London. It overlooks Sloane Square and is the very space where, years ago, she had the interview that got her a job at her favourite theatre in the world. Elyse is committed to everything that the Royal Court Theatre stands for - finding the best new writing, creating the most exciting new plays. And she is now responsible for running the workshops and making the contacts that explore territories all over the world. A new season of plays had just begun at the Royal Court when we met - a season that is the highlight and fruition we get to see every other year of the continuous and amazing workshops run by the Royal Court in many lands. In this season, one of the highlights must be the first appearance in London of several exciting playwrights from Cuba.

"Yes, indeed," Elyse says of her season, "it ends with Cuba and starts with Brazil and I think that it's a great reflection of where we've been working in the last two years. It's a really important part of our work and for the International Season - which happens every two years with the help of the Genesis Foundation and the great support that we have - it's possible to develop work in a very intensive way that's continuous and ongoing to find work that we really feel we want to do here at the Royal Court. Our job is to find and present the work of emerging international playwrights in a branded season at the Royal Court."

Like Ola Animashawun in the Young Playwrights Department, Elyse is looking for the raw talent. She wants to find the emerging writers in the different territories and give them that first, crucial push forward. Because of this she is less worried about the finish of the product than its voice and its power.

"The Season is one thing, which gives us a great opportunity to share the wealth of work we've been developing abroard. But the real work, the developmental work that happens in the two years, is about creating energy and stamina and strength for a new writing culture in the countries we're working in.

"That takes a very long time and you have to go back and back for a very long time. Also you have to be sensitive. This is not about imposing British theatrical values. We're just trying to say well, here we are, the Royal Court Theatre, and we started in 1956 and we didn't have a writing culture here in UK theatre, and it is through the Royal Court which decided to focus on the playwright that we have this thriving, new theatre-writing culture here today. And that's all we're really trying to do and achieve in those places - repeat the experiment."

Elyse has had some conspicuous success stories already with her International Seasons, not the least being the nabbing of some prestigious awards last time round. As always, she aims to build and develop from that foundation.

"We have a Russian playwright who won the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright a couple of years ago - the first time that a foreign language playwright has done that. Vasilly Sigarev was part of the work we began doing in Russia in 1999. We did a reading of his first play, Plasticine, in May 2001; and we did a full production of Plasticine in the theatre upstairs in 2002. The rest is history. Because Vassily is now a really well-known playwright here and still under the age of 30 we're doing his third play, Ladybird later in the season.

"And that shows we are not only promoting new writing and new work - we intend to build on our successes and continue to engage with the playwrights we discover. We're doing a Brazilian play by Marcos Barbosa in the season, a completely new writer to us here - but at the same time that we are doing Marcos's work we're saying, well, Vassily has now written a third play for us. We think it's his best play and we have to sustain that support with him as a playwright."

It is clear from everything that Elyse says that the ethos of the Royal Court means that once they discover somebody, they enter into a relationship. That's what the Royal Court has done for the last 50 years, nearly. It's the same with the International Playwrights as with the theatre as an entity. Our writers become part of the family."

Sitting above a busy, traffic-filled central London square on a sunny but cold day, Elyse reminisced about her time in Brazil over the past two years and more.

"We started working in Brazil in 2001 and Marcos Barbosa - a trained engineer - had written plays already and had worked in Fortaleza, in the North of Brazil. When he heard about us, he applied for our workshop in Sao Paolo. That was in 2001 and we knew immediately that he had a very original voice and a very special talent. We then invited him back to our international residency that we run every summer for international playwrights; and so he spent a month in London with us in 2002. That is a very typical step. And also in the beginning of 2003, based on our work out there, we brought five Brazilian playwrights over and we translated and read their plays and Marcos was part of that. So, as you can see, he was 23 when we first met him, he's 26 now, and we're producing two of his plays in our international season. And that is a reflection of our commitment to this writer and his development. It is a story we hope to repeat again and again from all over the world."

Other territories where this is already an ongoing process include Uganda, India and Siberia. I told Elyse how impressed I am by the coverage of her department.

"We really get around! We are a very small team. People don't realize that. I have a department of three. We can't work everywhere in the world, but we really look to work where we feel there is an energy and potential for new writing. And also where we can have partners, where we can have a mutually beneficial relationship with other theatre practitioners."

There should be no problem for anyone in any country who stumbles on the knowledge of the Royal Court International Programme but for some reason is too far away from a centre where work is happening or simply in a country where no work is yet taking place.

"The policy of the Royal Court is the same for everyone - we are committed to reading unsolicited scripts and giving a response to a writer wherever they are. Sometimes it takes a bit of time because in the cases of scripts not in English we also have to have them read by very special readers who know what we are looking for; but we will always give a response. Eventually we may have to get it translated; and translation is a very, very important part of our work. When we first started doing this international work ten years ago or so, we were very bad at finding translators or knowing how to go about it.

"Now one of the very important principles is that translators should have a real knowledge of theatre and not just the language they are translating. Often the best translators are actors, directors, playwrights and people who are involved in the theatre. And we found wonderful teams of translators in many languages - though some languages are particularly difficult. But we never give up on finding the right translators - and it's a very important principle that the translator is in the rehearsal process.

"At the moment we are rehearsing Vassily's new play and Sasha Dugdale, the translator, has been with Vassily right from the beginning of our work with him and she's in the rehearsal room too. She's a poet and a great translator and she is wonderful with Vassily's work - she knows his idiom. That shows in the translation we eventually put on the stage."

Watching the traffic slowly clogging up Sloane Square from our perch above the theatre's entrance, I asked Elyse how often the plays she found went on to further success and to having further impact.

"Most of the plays we have presented in the season have had further lives. The first season in the newly restored building was four years, when we did Mr Kolpert. This play then went on in the Schaubuhne in Germany - it's been all over Germany in German. But we did it in English and now it's also been to the States and Australia.

"We sometimes commission writers in a season to write very short plays for a particular reason. Last time we had human rights plays written by about a dozen writers from all part of the world - short plays. And many of those plays developed afterwards into longer plays. Marcos Barbosa's Almost Three became Almost Nothing, the play that we're doing in this season. A play by the Spanish writer, Juan Mayorga, is now a play in the season at the National Theatre in Madrid. A play by the Italian playwright, Fausto Paravadino, is now in the rep at the Schaubuhne in Belin.

"It is particularly thrilling to see the work travelling all over the world. Black Milk by Vassily Sigarev, which we did as part of our Russian Focus last year, has been presented in Chicago and Plasticine has been done all over Europe - there have been many productions. Vassily has become a very popular playwright throughout Europe. Plasticine did have a first production in Moscow and ours was the first English production. But the new play, Ladybird, we are the first to produce - it's a world premiere."

Elyse takes great pride in her work's ability to create a kind of international community around the play and playwrights she and her department have found. I wondered if she was going to have opportunities to commission short plays again this year.

"We find short plays makes a wonderful form to present writers we have been working with all over the world that we don't otherwise have the resources and opportunities to do. This time we have commissioned ten writers - and they all happen to be women, though we are not publicizing that and did not intend that to happen necessarily. Each writer is contributing a short play that looks at the situation of violence in her own country. We've had a remarkable response from those writers. We'll be producing ten of those short plays - calling the season States of Violence - and they are from places as different as India, China, Palestine, Brazil, Argentina, Sweden, Germany, and the USA. It's really a wide range of styles looking at this subject."

I wondered if this season was going to continue working with the Human Rights Watch Film Festival as in 2002.

"We had a very successful experiment last time called Theatre Meets Film. We took our Spanish play and Romanian play that dealt with immigration and showed it at the Ritzy in Brixton before a film that dealt with the same subject. We had the live presentation and the film, on the same theme, and it was very exciting; so we're doing it again. We've chosen this time one of the Indian films and a play for the USA to show with the film from the USA. There's so much potential for cross-fertilization here."

Elyse was extremely confident and articulate about what the aims of her department - and, indeed, of the whole Royal Court administration -- were when looking for her new plays and how much she found politics a binding theme in many of them.

"We're looking for powerful, provocative and original voices from new playwrights; and we're a contemporary theatre, looking for contemporary plays, not for adaptations or historical plays. We're very focused and single-minded - though never prescriptive about form. I think it's about an individual writer's response to the world they are living in. Our audiences are fascinated - particularly now much more than when we started ten years ago. Because the world is smaller, we're much more affected by what's happening in other places in the world and we want an insight into those societies. Having received a play from our Chinese playwright, Wang Xiaoli, whom we worked with in a residency two years ago, it's just an amazing insight into a little moment in Chinese contemporary life that I don't think we knew about before. I think that's happening with the Cuban plays, with the Palestinian plays. It's not about making big political statements. It's about having complex plays that actually try to deal with the realities of life in different parts of the world."

I asked Elyse if there were any criteria that should be told to a playwright - to someone who might otherwise waste time sending in the wrong kind of play for the Royal Court. But she insisted there was no wrong kind of play at the point of entry.

"If a play was wrong for us in terms of future possible development here but we felt it showed talent in its own idiom, we would say so and we would steer the author - but we would probably say we are not interested. We say that we don't want adaptations. We want something contemporary - new - a strong and original voice. We are looking for an original story and something that deals with the world that playwright is living in. We start a lot of workshops by saying to the writers: What are the subjects that you as playwrights want to address?

"I cannot stress enough that we don't want to impose a British or Western European view of what a play should be - we want you to emerge from your own culture and theatre. It's a two way process, and by learning about other theatrical cultures and traditions, it enriches not only our own audiences but also our playwrights.

"For example, many of the European playwrights we work with and the Russian writers are much more experimental in form than the British writers are. Our writers have been much more impressed and influenced by that and our audiences want to see that as well. Sometimes using more music and movement, again, is something that we've seen in Latin America and in some of the African work. The tradition of story telling in the Middle East influences the theatrical form and ideals there."

Each time Elyse enters a new territory, she start a new adventure, like the explorers of old.

"I've been to Cuba six times in the past two years. Cuba is a kind of fantasy for most of us, people of my generation. We were alive during the Revolution and watched it and admired things about it; were full of pain when things didn't go well. But I think most people always wanted the best for the Cuban people themselves who have suffered a lot yet who have such an exciting and vibrant culture. To have the opportunity to go there and find out what the artists in Cuba felt they needed to support their theatre, to find out what the writers felt would be useful for them and to take part, has been an enormously moving experience and a real privilege. Three of us, all women, went back to Cuba three times over the one year and always worked with people from all over the country on work about their own realities. It was inspiring.

"We haven't been as closed off as Cuba so we've had the opportunity to see theatre develop all over the world, and we could bring some of that knowledge with us. The Cuban Ministry of Culture was very open. They want contact and are full of enthusiasm.

"In most Latin American countries we've worked with, there's more of a tradition of reviving classical works and of adaptation and historical plays than of contemporary playwriting. Although the cinema in Cuba has dealt a lot with the Cuban reality, there haven't been too many plays coming up looking at contemporary lives. Giving that as the purpose of the project brought us ten plays that explore that and I think it is very exciting.
"Five plays that we are bringing over, besides the staged ones, will not be fully produced but they will be done as readings and we are bringing over six playwrights. One of them is the father of contemporary Cuban playwriting, Gerardo Fulleda, a playwright and director, who is instrumental in supporting the younger writers and he's been a great link for us in these workshops. So he is coming with five of the ten young directors he's been working with.

"This is the Fourth International Season and we can draw on so many more writers, the audiences are so much more interested; the support for international new writing is growing every time. When we find international work we want to produce, we do so. We don't wait for a season. But we always have plenty we can do in the season, especially in promoting the very newest voices. So the Royal Court is becoming again an international theatre of new writing. It was that in the 50s when we produced Wole Soyinka , Ionesco, Beckett, etc.

"One more thing in the season that is brand new. The writers from the UK who are sent out to do the workshops will often be stimulated in their own work and will perhaps write new work in reaction to that experience. So this time we have five of our writers writing about their experiences going out there. We have an evening called City States".

I asked Elyse if there was anything else from the new season that she wanted to highlight and she was quick with a response, her eyes gleaming at the excitement of what she had to impart and her amazing smile fully operational.

"We're actually going to do a half day called the State of Palestine from a panel we did two years ago, to look at what has moved on. Sadly, of course, things are not resolved - and I'm sure that will come up - but one of the bright things about it is that one of our directors, who's been involved with our project for a long time, Raeda Ghazaleh, has been working with Palestinian school girls in the West Bank. And over the last year they've been writing diaries in their English classes about their daily experiences of living in the West Bank during this very difficult time to come up with a theatrical piece called Bethlehem Diaries.

"We're going to produce a piece based on this. In fact, I would love to bring the girls over, because they actually produced it, but we're going to bring the teacher over - which is all the budget allows. They're very moving accounts and Raeda and her company worked with the girls in their school in Bethlehem and then performed the pieces at a nearby convent close to the Church of the Nativity."

Finally, all Elyse had to say was: "Tell everyone to book as many tickets as they can and come again and again."

And at that very moment she had to leave to receive an incoming call from Sao Paolo.