In the mid-80s, an unemployed actor sent the Royal Court scraps of his writing. These scenes – or, more often, half scenes, snapshots of life in the north of England – would arrive sporadically on chewed-up bits of paper. Mel Kenyon, now a top literary agent, remembers typing them up as they came in. Those pages were the beginning of Road, Jim Cartwright’s debut, later voted one of the best plays of the 20th century.
Unsolicited scripts were at the core of Max Stafford-Clark’s Royal Court. Andrea Dunbar’s The Arbor and Gregory Motton’s Ambulance both came in around the same time, changing the landscape. Today, they hardly ever make it to the stage. A writer’s debut play tends to follow a lot of unseen work – writers’ development courses, readings, workshops, short plays and so on. Jack Thorne, currently co-writing the Harry Potter play, has written of years spent submitting scripts to no avail. Duncan Macmillan, writer of People, Places and Things at the National Theatre, says he went seven years before getting a commission.
Even literary departments seemed to give up on them. In 2012, the Bush introduced submission windows to minimise the workload of reading plays the theatre wasn’t producing itself. Even after that change, it hasn’t staged a single unsolicited submission.
Actually, you see more unsolicited scripts than you might think. Technically speaking, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was unsolicited. Simon Stephens started work of his own accord. “It just depends how you want to define it,” says Kenyon, “and how romantic you want to be.”
Let’s be very romantic. “Common understanding is a script by a new writer that’s come from nowhere,” says Kenyon. It arrives in an A4 envelope and simply begs to be staged. It’s plucked off the slush pile and changes British theatre. The image is of a jaded literary manager surprised by something completely new.
The Royal Court is staging three such scripts in a row. Cordelia Lynn’s Lela & Co, Nicola Wilson’s Plaques and Tangles, and You For Me For You by the American playwright Mia Chung all arrived in Sloane Square without warning. Literary manager Chris Campbell couldn’t believe his luck: “I’m walking on air at the moment.”
And yet, it’s not as simple – or as romantic – as all that: “None of them came from people we’d never heard of.” Campbell had seen Lynn’s first play, worked with Wilson and had a meeting with Mia when she was visiting London. “Three different processes, but all founded on the principle that if you send us an envelope, we will open it.”
That was all Wilson was hoping for. Having worked in the Bush theatre’s literary department herself, knowing the way these things work, she submitted her script – a portrait of Alzheimer’s disease – more in “blind hope” than anything else. She wanted feedback and ended up with a production: “It’s what a writer always hopes for. To think they were actually going to put it on was mindblowing.”
The irony is that as new work has increased – up from 20% to 60% by 2013 – the chance of getting staged straight away has shrunk. Competition is the key. The Royal Court received about 1,000 scripts a year when Road came in. Today it gets 3,000. Campbell shows me today’s haul: 10 hefty A4 envelopes, each covered in stamps.
These scripts aren’t just up against each other. More writers are under commission. More are in development schemes. New writing has become much more professional. The value placed on unsolicited scripts is about the romance of untutored genius. “Writing a play is an extremely difficult thing to do,” says Campbell. “It’s natural that very few [unsolicited scripts] are that good.”
However, despite the conspiracy theories and “the idea that we spend our days rejecting scripts with an evil snigger”, Campbell doesn’t see that as a particular problem. “The hit rate of putting things on isn’t important.”
Instead, unsolicited scripts are how theatres meet playwrights. Bush associate dramaturg Rob Drummer sees them as an introduction and a sign of openness. While the Bush hasn’t staged a submission since its policy shift, it has commissioned several writers straight off the bat: Chris Thompson’s Albion being one such example.
Of course, great scripts slip through the net. Barney Norris sent Visitors, the play that won him a Critics’ Circle award, to 18 organisations before producing it independently. Dawn King’s acclaimed debut Foxfinder also had a string of rejection letters.
However, the submission process privileges certain types of writer – not least those who can afford to write on spec. “When you just open the doors, 90% of the time, you get plays that aren’t the sort we need right now,” says Drummond. “We have to be much more responsible for what and who ends up on stage. It’s not as simple as getting a script and bunging it on stage.” Only one in five scripts sent to the National is written by a woman. Fewer still come from BAME writers.
And yet, at a time of limited funding, towering slush piles could be a goldmine. Cheaper to dig out a half-decent script from there than to commission one that might come good. It’s basic economics, right? Encourage competition, exploit excess supply, save a small fortune.
So, is the commission under threat? No, says the Court’s artistic director Vicky Featherstone. “That’s the most important thing we do.” Commissions provide playwrights with a living, with security and the space and time to do good work. “We would die if people didn’t send us their work,” says Featherstone. “We’re always looking. At the Royal Court, really, there’s no such thing as an unsolicited script. We solicit scripts.”
A massive slush pile isn’t failsafe. As Campbell says “You can rely on finding a writer. You can’t rely on finding a play.” Reliability isn’t the point, though. Unsolicited scripts are about unpredictability. You should know what you’re getting from a commission. Submissions can take you by surprise. If more are making it to the stage, it’s because there’s a desire to push new writing into new territories. “We’re in a very receptive period,” says Kenyon, excitedly. “We’ve got a lovely smörgåsbord of artistic directors, many of them new, all very open and out to discover new writers.”
• Plaques and Tangles is at the Royal Court, London, until 21 November.
