37 Plays

York Theatre Royal/Designed and Facilitated by Paul Birch/A ten-week course (Autumn 2023) in partnership with the RSC’s 37 Plays project/ Written by Julie Raby, Anna Outram, Maggie Smales, Ethan Taylor, Tom Wilson, Sophie Kilmartin, Anna Dawkins and Johnny Robinson/ Performed by Marcus Boardwell, Christine Bramwell, Donna Carrier, Jonathan Cook, Ann Crossley, Marie- Louise Feeley, Linda Fletcher, Stuart Green, Nicola Jenkins, Paul Pryor, Rosalind Reynolds, Joanne Rule, Zaim Saoudi & Esther Wilson.

37 Plays is a national playwriting project led by the RSC and Associate regional partners to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio, the first time his plays were brought together in one book. The project’s aspiration was to find the contemporary stories of our nation and to inspire people to write plays. The extracts are from writers who took part in our writing groups established for the project, which we ran here in York and in Selby. .

This ten-week course paired local community actors with scripts written by local writers for submission into the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 37 Plays Initiative. A true celebration of local talent teaching approaches to tackling texts of all kinds; using acting theories from influential practitioners including Stanislavsky, Meisner, Max Stafford-Clarke, Keith Johnstone and Stella Adler. This culminated in a final evening of a rehearsed reading of extracts from the chosen plays.

We begin at the beginning. We begin with words.

Thanks to the RSC’s 37 Plays initiative we at York Theatre Royal were able to run several playwriting programmes and workshops aimed at helping local playwrights, at all levels of experience, put words on a page.

These words came in the form of monologues, dialogues, scenes, short-pieces, One-Act dramas and even full length plays. They traversed many different territories; from period drama, through comedic farce to hard-hitting contemporary drama. The worlds, and their characters are rich and varied.

The performance is a way to hear the work of some of those writers and for those artists to hear their words being given the beginnings of life by local actors. These varied works are being performed by local community actors as part of their weekly YTR evening classes and they have been taught and encouraged to use different approaches to analysing script from which to create performance.

But it is just a beginning…

These pieces will be read rather than given a fully rehearsed performance. The pieces have not been cast (as one might with a full production) but rather we have used the varied voices in our ensemble to give an early flavour of the dramatic potential that these texts have to offer. Some of these are complete works whilst others are fragmentary glimpses of much larger and longer scripts. In the interests of offering as many writers as possible the chance for their work to be shared we are often using scenes, speeches and sections of scripts rather than hearing the plays in full.

Hopefully, the writers and actors will find ways to more fully realise these texts and that ‘tomorrow’ will offer the opportunity for these works to be seen as well as heard.