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Comment by Jay Smith on December 27, 2011 at 13:46

Hey Guys,

I'd like to draw everyones attention to a unique performance project at Swansea Metropolitan University in January.

PROJECT SENSE - Is a multi disciplinary and multi sensory performance linking departments across the university to create a wonderfully creative and unique performance.

'Project Sense is a Welsh Government funded performance project that encourages students and recent graduates to be entrepreneurial and consider how their skills can be applied commercially.

Students and graduates from a wide variety of disciplines across the Met have joined forces to form a pan University theatre company. This extra curricular project is being run as a professional company with participants collaborating and making all the decisions. The Met has a strong background in supporting business start ups and all the students involved in the project are being offered advice to help them if they choose to start up their own business or become a self employed practitioner.

The project is supported by a series of workshops by professional companies and practitioners. The students and graduates are from a range of different subjects including Business, Marketing, Video, Music Technology, Animation, Photography, Technical Theatre and Performing Arts. It will be the first time that so many subjects have collaborated on a project.'

http://www.facebook.com/events/278106922232547/

www.smu.ac.uk/projectsense

Hopefully we shall see you there.

Comment by meredydd barker on December 22, 2011 at 12:27

Masonic llawen;FFs... who am I to argue with spellcheck? Be safe, keep working. Medx

Comment by Kevin Johnson on December 22, 2011 at 2:31

Is there something psychologically wrong with Quentin Letts? So the RSC is middle class,  I go there, I support it, am I middle class now? If so, can I have their money please? As for all the dreadful things that happened in Blasted, has he ever read/seen what goes on in a Shakespear play? Gloucester's eyes? Children baked in a pie? The rape, mutilation & eventual filicide of Lavinia?

 

There have been plays I've liked & ones I've hated, but I know that that's no measure of how good the play is. Somebody, somewhere may love what I hate because it speaks to them but not to me. I'm okay with that.

 

And as for political theatre, I'm not sure what it is, but thanks to Mr Letts, I know what political criticism is.  

Comment by Adam Somerset on December 21, 2011 at 2:39

Carmen, hi

This may well be wrong, but as I remember it, Havel’s stature was not due to a particular work of theatre. It’s rare that a piece of theatre becomes a political event in itself, although I can think of a couple of examples. It was more that he stood for a kind of unimpeachable integrity, that the writer or artist has a voice, and a right to speak, without it having to be be permitted by Authority. Ahdaf Soueif is assuming a similar kind of role in Cairo today.

 

There is a lot been said about theatre and politics. The best description of political  theatre I have ever come across was delivered in Swansea’s Old Library. John (M) broke it into four distinct categories. Unfortunately, because it was spoken, I didn’t write it down & have forgotten (!)- ask him if you meet.

 

Happy Holiday

 

Comment by carmen medway-stephens on December 19, 2011 at 8:20

Vaclav Havel, the playwright who died on the weekend, don't know much about him but interested in how he used theatre to help change politics...any thoughts?

 

Comment by Matt Ball on December 15, 2011 at 23:38

Thanks Meredydd, reading that's made my morning

Comment by Matthew Bulgo on December 15, 2011 at 22:01

Ah, you got there before me, Meredydd. Isn't it a corker of a blog. And extraordinary behaviour from Letts.

Comment by meredydd barker on December 15, 2011 at 21:42

http://www.danrebellato.co.uk/Site/Spilled_Ink/Entries/2011/12/13_T...

I think everyone should be aware of what Letts has been up to. This is a brilliant blog entry.

Comment by meredydd barker on December 13, 2011 at 3:41

An eminent sculptor said to me along time ago that it's a mistake to think that making a living while being an artist is a problem. Treat it as being part of the fascination of being an artist and you'll go some way towards surviving. There's something to that, I think.

Comment by Gary Owen on December 13, 2011 at 3:03

Hi Carmen - when I started out, I used to earn a living from theatre - but that certainly wasn't theatre just in Wales.  I lived on my own in a room in someone else's house, had no dependents, no debts, no car, no holidays, and found it reasonably easy to get by on less than £20k a year.   Also, I got really lucky in my first few years - I won several prizes that came with a few grand's worth of prize money, got a Pearson Bursary.  But as Med says, that's not a living, that's luck. 

I couldn't live like that any more, now I have a child to look after - and I don't.  I've had an incredibly good run in terms of getting plays on recently, with nine new pieces produced in 2009 and 2010 - but even so, TV has paid half my wages in the last few years.  And at the moment I have nothing written, and no hope of anything getting on in the theatre before 2013. 

As for other writers - I think Charles Way probably might earn a living from theatre, but I stand to be corrected.  His work for children seems to get lots of productions all over the UK and in Germany.  Because the trick to earning a living from playwrighting isn't commissions - it's royalties.  If a commissioning fee is £7-8k depending on the theatre, then you need to have three or four plays commissioned and produced every year to get near earning the national average wage, which I believe is around £24k. No-one can keep up that level of activity - and frankly, no-one gets that many plays produced.  You might manage it one year - I did in 2010, Tim has this year - but you'll be hard pressed to manage it consistently.  What you need is for your plays to go on earning after you've written them.  So you need either a commercial hit which thousands of people want to come and see (on which you'll earn 8% of the box office, once your advance is paid off), or you need plays which get a succession of small productions all over the world, each of which might earn you anything from a couple of hundred to a few thousand.  Or both at the same time, at which point you will actually get rich (a leading British playwright remarked on facebook the other day that he's earned in excess of £100k a year for the last several years). 

And so the one Welsh writer I'd be reasonably certain earns a living from theatre is Frank Vickery - and he does it with seemingly little support from the subsidised sector.  He writes plays that people want to come and see, time and again - and my God, so many of us sneer at him for it. 

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