Tartan army ... Black Watch is set to tour. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
This week, the blogosphere has a hangover. On Saturday, the West End Whingers held their second annual party for bloggers, mates and theatrical types. Among the many bloggers that were there, Helen Smith gained a caricature of herself but lost a hat, and Natasha Tripney drank lots of gin.
But while everyone recovers, and before this blog begins to resemble the celeb blog over at Hello! magazine, let's turn to slightly weightier things. I am genuinely saddened to see that David Eldridge has decided to give up blogging. It seems his decision was spurred, in part, by an argument that was unintentionally started by last week's Noises Off column. Though I did not always agree with everything David said, I found his willingness to really explore his thoughts and ideas about playwriting and theatre in general consistently stimulating and I will miss his presence on the web. In happier news however, the director Paul Miller - whose show Baby Girl/DNA/The Miracle was recently on at the National, has decided to restart his own blog, London Life. Having lain dormant for a while, it is now live in a shiny new location.
Moving further afield, George Hunka wrote an extremely interesting essay in response to an article by the critic Michael Feingold. Feingold criticises what he sees as "a lack of drama" in plays by many young American writers which deal only "with small groups of people... whose lives intersect for no particular reason, sometimes by improbable coincidences". While Feingold blames theatre managers for the preponderance of this kind of drama, Hunka thinks the reason lies elsewhere; namely that it is down to the dominance of academic MFA programmes in theatre over many emerging writers. These programmes, he says, by their nature encourage an aesthetic conformity, adding: "great drama might yet still be produced by these MFA graduates. But insofar as these programs cater to an aesthetic paradigm of 'a harmless, vaguely insipid virtual reality' with the reward of production by an American theatre sympathetic to that paradigm, the likelihood is less."
The structure through which new writers are developed in the UK is not quite as rigid as in the States. But there does appear to be an increasing proliferation of university courses in creative writing, and it will be interesting to see what effect this has, in the long term, on our new writing culture.
Finally, like The Bardathon I am very excited about the impending and long-awaited arrival of the National Theatre of Scotland's extraordinary production Black Watch in England. This leads me to realise I have been shamefully neglecting the growing number of Scottish theatre blogs out there. View from the Stalls was hugely impressed by a second viewing of Black Watch, as was Onstage Scotland. Generally, Mark Fisher's blog and website provides an excellent guide to what's going on north of the border. And Joyce Macmillan, the Scotsman's long-time theatre critic has recently started a blog of her own. Through her tireless annual coverage of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival she has, along with Lyn Gardner, probably done more to encourage and foster new work and emerging talent than any other critic. Gosh, all these tartan coloured thoughts are making me pine for August on the Royal Mile...
