It's good to see a piece of non-traditional theatre triumph in the London Evening Standard awards earlier this week, as was the case with Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd's You Me Bum Bum Train – but it's also a reminder of just how long it can take for a piece of non-script based experimental or devised theatre to develop. Bum Bum has been around in various different forms for several years, long before it began its run at the LEB building in Bethnal Green under the auspices of the Barbican.
Long timescales are not unusual for projects that can't just be assessed on script alone. This week I'm going to see Kazuko Hohki's The Great Escape, a supervised adventure for six to 11-year-olds around the Victorian spaces of Battersea town hall, whose antecedents lie in Hohki's Evidence for the Existence of Borrowers back in 2004, and which has been worked on continuously since. One of the great strengths of BAC's development process is that it often builds both work and young audiences simultaneously through participatory projects, but it can be a slow and painstaking process. Later this week I'm going to see Cart Macabre at The Old Vic Tunnels – a show I first experienced at a try-out after a period of research and development 18 months ago. Likewise, Punchdrunk's Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle didn't emerge from nowhere: they honed their craft over a number of shows before they came to critical attention. Gecko's The Overcoat may have travelled all over the world, but it's still being worked on. It will never really be finished, at least not in the same way that a playtext can be finished.
"The whole of the establishment," Kneehigh's Emma Rice has argued, "is based around the well-made play landing on the desk." You can see why: it's easier and there's far less risk. Of course, the desk isn't quite the end of the process – plays also get read, are maybe given a rehearsed reading and are then rewritten – but from the moment the first draft is delivered, they are tangible entities. But experimental or devised theatre often begins with little more than an idea. It's how that idea develops and grows that matters, and if there is a script in existence, it's often just a skeleton that needs flesh upon its bones.
All of which makes the existence of the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust award, dedicated to help emerging practitioners in experimental theatre, a good thing – though also a demonstration of the difference between a great idea and a great show. The award has been around since 2003, but really only began to demonstrate results when it teamed up with the Barbican and started to offer both mentoring and financial assistance for research and development. Slung Low's fine Helium was the beneficiary in 2008, ending a run of OSBTT winners who had obviously talked a good show but found it far harder to walk one. The 2010 winner was – you guessed it – You Me Bum Bum Train.
The 2012 award will be for a site-responsive piece to take place in one of the five London Olympic boroughs and it comes with a very substantial £50,000 attached. Applications are due in by 17 December. I suspect that it won't be an idea thought up from scratch that will be the winner, but a piece of work that has already been in research and development in some form. And that's no bad thing.
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