HOW DO I GET MY PLAY ON? Twelve Playwrights answer.
We chatted to some brilliant playwrights, asking them to share their experiences of getting plays to production, and what advice they would give to others. Here's what they said!
CHRIS BUSH
“Community work has been a lifesaver because, as well as being incredibly rewarding, its almost always commissioned with a guaranteed production scheduled.”
Chris wrote her first play at 13 and got the writing bug after winning a young playwrights competition. When she first took a play to the Edinburgh fringe, no one came. So she tried again the next year with what she calls a ‘shamelessly commercial title’ and did much better. After several years of working minimum wage jobs and ‘sending scripts off into the void’, she landed a year long attachment at Sheffield Theatres, and a couple of months at the NT studio off the back of open submission script windows. At first Sheffield only seemed to trust her with their non-professional community shows, but eventually a new artistic director took a chance on her writing a studio show. After that work became more regular. There was no pivotal moment, more a gradual chipping away.
One of the hardest lessons Chris learnt was that even if you have the best script in the world, a lot of places will only ever see it as a calling card, rather than something they'd actually stage. Best case, they commission a different show from you. She also says that, in her experience, the biggest looking breaks never tend to amount to much; it’s random cups of tea that tend to lead to something useful. Also, some things take forever. Chris’s show at the Almeida next year has been 7 years in the making after being picked up and dropped by other theatres.
HANNAH KHALIL
“Don’t wait for people to notice your brilliance - ask for the meetings. The worst that can happen is they say no”
Hannah says she spent far too long hoping someone would notice her hard work. She says we should put ourselves in front of people. It took Hannah a long time to find an agent. She found the search demoralising. She kept hearing that people liked her work but didn’t know what they would ‘do’ with her, but when she found the right one, they had a good rapport from the start.
TOM MORTON-SMITH
“The best advice I was given, and served me well, was to send your plays to the assistants. Whether assistant literary managers or agents’ assistants, they are often at a similar stage of career development as you. Those relationships are the most important to maintain as you will grow together.”
Tom worked for ten years at a minimum wage retail job whilst working on his career as a playwright. He says it was essential to view it as a career because the imposter syndrome around calling himself a writer and the ease of it being merely a hobby would have got him nowhere.
Tom’s main advice is essentially that you get where you’re going because of the relationships and alliances you build. He concedes that upward networking is attractive; it’s lovely when someone you’ve admired or respected likes your work, but there will always be an inbuilt power imbalance. Tom sent his first play to the literary assistant at the Hampstead who took him with her when she became literary manager at Paines Plough, and then again when she became head of new work at the RSC. Tom believes lateral networking is the best kind of networking, but acknowledges departments have been so thoroughly gutted that there are barely any literary managers and assistants left. Even so, the idea that we should nurture relationships with our peers is sage.
SONALI BHATTACHARYYA
“Find the people you collaborate well with and hold onto them! New writing is tough at the moment, but so important”
Sonali is another great believer in the power of building relationships - that we should talk to people we work well with about our ideas and dream up projects together. And that includes building on our relationships with theatres we may have already written for. Sonali finds building new relationships with commissioners one of the most frustrating parts of playwriting, so advises that we look after the relationships we have carefully - “Make it clear to them you have something to say and are hungry to say it.”
DAVID ELDRIDGE AND LUKE BARNES
Whilst the word ‘career’ served Tom well, Luke Barnes and David Eldridge take a different view. Both say it implies a trajectory you can follow, when in reality it’s more random. David advises we make our best work and see what happens, emphasising the importance of economic survival within this.
“I think you have to take seriously how you survive economically and subsidise writing plays. While many of us dream of that time when we earn a bit more money from our work, and can quit employment and write full time, in reality it's often unwise to give up the day job. Playwriting is often so poorly and haphazardly remunerated that only other part time or full time employment, or work writing for TV or Radio, effectively makes writing a new play possible and viable. Writers struggling to pay their rent or bills, or unable to afford to go and see plays or live a bit, rarely write well. One of the most pernicious myths (spread by non-writers) is this idea that a writer must be starving in their garret to be sharp. In reality, crippling worry about money stifles creativity and encourages bad short term choices. A prominent Literary Manager once waggled their finger at me and warned me not to get too comfortable. I gave them a piece of my mind! What the hell do they know?” - David Eldridge
“The best thing I heard was to look at the word ‘career’. In our heads it’s a logical path moving forward when it reality in context it’s more like: I careered all over the road and eventually stopped on the hard shoulder” - Luke Barnes
SARAH SIGAL
“Once you learn to structure a story and write dialogue you can kind of write anything.”
During the pandemic, Sarah finished a draft of a novel she'd adapted from a play she’d taken to Edinburgh. After years as a playwright, approaching literary agents for fiction gave her serious imposter syndrome. But she did it. The book came out last year and she’s working on another. Sarah’s agent told her it's much easier for playwrights to go into other areas than fiction writers to write dialogue, because dialogue is the hard part. Her advice is, if your play isn't getting made, turn it into something else, which is a helpful mindset when the odds seem to be stacked against playwrights at the moment.
WALEED AKHTAR
“Think of the scale of the show - a one person show is much more of a safe bet for theatres”
Waleed Akhtar echoes the thoughts already put forward, adding that scale might be a deciding factor. He also reminds us that there are actors out there looking for great parts. If you know them, or don’t and want to work with them, their passion could help you get something on. Plus, they might have connections!
DAWN KING
“Follow the opportunities”
As with most playwrights, Dawn’s journey hasn’t been linear. Her first rehearsed reading at the Royal Court was in 2001, but it wasn’t until 10 years later that she won the Papatango prize. Even after Papatango, she struggled to get commissioned. She wrote her next play on a seed commission and it got picked up then. She says she pitched her play The Trials around all over the place to no avail, and only after it was commissioned and shortlisted for a prize in Germany did the Donmar decide to take it.
“Unfortunately it seems to me that a lot of reading/workshop/short play opportunities, as well as the literary departments and managers, simply don’t exist any more. I think we are moving back to a situation where playwrights are likely to have to somehow fund the writing of very developed first drafts and get theatres to read them.”
She says that always having several ideas ready to pitch, and following opportunities where they lead are both important. While she’s currently being ‘savagely ghosted’ by some people and theatres she’s worked with in the UK, she will soon be working on a feature film for the same German director who picked up her latest play.
RAFAELLA MARCUS
“As someone who has had one single play staged which went well, for me it was a combination of years of graft in another role, and some blinding luck.”
Rafaella has been a new writing director and dramaturg for years, which she says put her off writing a play for a long time, because she knew instinctively how hard it was. But there was one idea that wouldn’t leave her alone. She says that knowing how to structure and having dramaturgical instincts already in place was a huge boost for her debut. Rafaella saw a company calling out for scripts online, and having just seen one of their shows she knew ‘the vibes were aligned’. They liked both the play and that she backed herself (having booked in two VAULT dates already). It went to Roundabout in Edinburgh, then on tour.
While she now has a calling card, the pools of literary manager talent drying up cited by others is a problem - lots of lovely emails and brief check-ins with literary departments saying how much they like the play but don’t have any commissioning money. Rafaella is writing her second play using seed commission from Women in Theatre Lab and subsidy from other work, both writing and day job.
“‘We like the sound of this, bring us a script when you have it’ is not sustainable really, so I think of playwriting more as something I need to keep doing to satisfy my own curiosity and ambition within theatre and stagecraft in general, rather than a ‘career’, which is way too linear a word.”
SUHAYLA EL BUSHRA
Suhayla has mainly been commissioned to write adaptations since her first two original plays were staged, and has noticed that the industry increasingly wants existing IP because it’s safer.
“There is also a racist/prejudiced element to it, I think. Original ideas about ‘marginalised’ people are even harder to get under way, especially if, like me, you tend to write big plays for larger casts.”
Suhayla doesn’t see the situation changing anytime soon, so her advice is to keep doing adaptations if that’s what you’re being offered, or approach theatres with suggestions of projects you’d like to adapt yourself; just be bold and make them completely your own. In other words, use them to say what you want, rather than honouring the original.
NAOMI WESTERMAN
Naomi is just getting her first four week run after 9 years. She wrote her first play ‘by accident’ in 2015 and sent it to just one theatre, the New Wolsley in Ipswich, who accepted it and gave her £500. At first she thought ‘this playwriting lark is easy’ until that play went on at the Arcola with lots of attention but no offers. She started to seriously pursue playwriting in 2017 when she wrote her second play (which was performed at Vault Festival) and received her first commission from Graeae the same year. In 2018, she was chosen by James Graham to co-write the play Sketching, and received her second commission from the Bush Theatre (for whom Naomi had co-written two community productions). Naomi says she was shortlisted or won a lot of awards and received several commissions over the years, but this never translated to a full run, just lots of rehearsed readings or short runs. And she never wrote directly to theatres, simply because she didn’t know you could. She also founded a disability theatre company named Little but Fierce and started producing work by other disabled creatives.
Naomi’s story is another that attests to the non-linear narrative. After landing an agent that turned out to be the wrong fit and a handful of ‘career changing’ production offers that ended up falling through, Naomi found her way out of some personal and professional struggles over the Covid years and landed a publishing deal to write a non-fiction book. Then in 2021, the play she wrote back in 2017 won a playwriting competition which came with a four-week run; however it took the production company a further three years (and negotiations with five separate venues) before the production was finally contracted for a run at the King’s Head Theatre in 2025. Naomi points out that every production or commission she’s ever had has been the result of either entering a playwriting competition, or submitting a script to an unsolicited script submission window; she feels that as a working class playwright, she lacks the connections to pitch work directly or have meetings with venues.
ALEX KANEFSKY
Al’s shows all have quite different pathways to production. He was commissioned to write Cable Street after producers saw some songs at Adam Lenson’s Signal showcases. Whilst this was a musical, there have been similar instances of extracts at scratch events leading to conversations with venues.
Before Cable Street, Al self produced everything through his company, landing Arts Council funding for projects, tours, and R&D. It’s worth saying that this is work for family audiences, where the ecology can be quite different, but has resulted in a lot of his work being paid, and seen by audiences. Al doesn’t necessarily recommend self producing, at least not without partners or a company setup, but there are quite a few people in Theatre for Young Audiences that do it that way.
JON BRITTAIN
“When I was starting out, I internalised the narrative that the path to success was to get your first play produced upstairs at the Royal Court, your second play downstairs, then onto big shows at the National, in the West End, or on telly. In reality, most people’s paths are much windier and more interesting than that. After Rotterdam at Theatre503, I’ve not had a play on at any new writing venue in London. It’s all been through regional theatres, commercial producers and fringe theatre companies.”
Jon started out writing and self-producing small-scale plays at the Edinburgh and London fringes. During this time he met Steve Harper, the literary manager of Theatre503, and transferred a double bill of Edinburgh shows there. He applied and was selected for the 503Five and while the play he wrote was not selected for production, he took part in several shorts nights - including one which led to the creation of Margaret Thatcher Queen of Soho, which became 503’s Christmas show in 2013 and a fringe hit the following year. Steve then gave his play Rotterdam to the director Donnacadh O’Briain, who had raised money for a production, and that was produced at 503 in 2015.
Following that, Jon wrote A Super Happy Story (About Feeling Super Sad) for Silent Uproar, a theatre company in Hull. It’s important to note that they approached him, as it wouldn’t have necessarily occurred to Jon that a company would be looking for a relationship with a writer. Due to their location, they had access to different relationships, actors and funding streams than a London-based company might. Furthermore, when the play was made, they were very committed to touring it and giving it a long life because it was their company’s calling card as well as his own.
During the same time, he also formed a relationship with the commercial producer James Seabright, who employed him as an assistant director on the Potted Potter shows and would later go on to take over producing Queen of Soho. James would occasionally approach Jon with pitches for shows and be very upfront about what he could pay for them - “I have this much money to make a show on topic X - would you like to do it?” Jon says the benefit of these projects was that, unlike a lot of commissions, they came with a production attached. As long as you could work within the parameters, that show would happen.
In the following years, he worked on shows for Francesca Moody Productions and for Sam Hodges, who ran the Nuffield Southampton Theatres before founding Tilted Productions. Jon says that, in general, independent producers tend to respond to a play or a pitch with a straightforward ‘yes or no’, and have multiple avenues to get a production on - without being constrained to one building or space.
Jon’s advice is to follow the work of both smaller theatre companies around the country and smaller commercial producers - you might find that they are looking to make the same sort of work that you are.
This article was created as part of our No Silly Questions initiative, where we asked playwrights to ask us any questions they felt awkward or silly about asking. More than half were about getting your play to production!
Hope this was a useful read. We hope to see you at the Playwrights Christmas Party - 26th Nov 7 - midnight.
All love and thank you to the above playwrights
Anna
Article by Anna Jordan & Lia Burge of LBRWrites.