Ian Rickson and International Playwrights at the Royal Court

Voices of the Royal Court

Interview by Mel Cooper, October 2001

The Royal Court Theatre is known for its innovative plays and productions, for its commitment to finding the playwrights of the future. This has been a large part of its brief since it became the home of the English Stage Company in 1956. Under its last three Artistic Directors - Max Stafford-Clark, Stephen Daldry and now, Ian Rickson - the Royal Court has, if anything, made this commitment even more central to its mission. For the past several years, the Royal Court has presented special seasons of International Playwrights, in association with the Genesis Foundation and its earlier guises - as it is doing in Spring  2002.

One feature of the Royal Court in the finest times of its history has been a real commitment and loyalty to the new authors it discovers. Often it's the second and third plays of a playwright's career that are the most difficult for any author to write. Critics can like the first play and then knock them down on the second and third play. Yet we don't want this to be a club where the writers get their plays put on simply because there are members; and we do want to make very stringent judgments play by play.

Nevertheless, our writers need loyalty and commitment. When they write in that kind of supportive and encouraging context, they often write good plays. We have American writer Rebecca Gilman, for instance, on her fourth play now; and we can see the improvements and growth of assurance through each play. That is what is so exciting!

But also we have the specific seasons. We have the International Playwrights Season which we run every second year with major assistance from the Genesis Foundation and that is very exciting stuff that has differences from our every day work. It allows the whole theatre to be immersed in this spirit of experiment. Our UK Young Playwrights Festival also gives us the excitement of bringing on young talent. But the international seasons have the extra excitement of bringing to the Royal Court and our audiences the immense charge we get opening ourselves up to other cultures.

Many of the plays we receive for consideration in the normal way are quite metropolitan. They come from all over England. International Playwrights gives us another dimension. Suddenly to realize and be thinking about having a play from the Urals in Russia, to have a play from modern Germany, to have ten-minute plays from Argentina and Brazil, is really awakening for us.

I believe that wherever it originates, the best theatre is international and the best theatre engages with our times and its issues. This gives us a kind of urgency of spirit in the work we are doing.

Also, playwrights are affected by what they see and we are giving our own playwrights a different perspective by bringing in the international plays. If you simply produce other metropolitan plays, all you get is copies of those plays.

Whereas to open up our playwrights to unusual plays from Scandinavia or Africa, which have very different plays, it cannot help but affect the consciousness of our own writers.

So an international festival has a terrific cross-fertilizing impact - on playwrights, on the audiences that see the plays too.

For more information, email internationalroyalcourttheatre [dot] com