West End Transfers 2007
The following productions transferred to the West End in 2007.
Fanny and Faggot
Awards 2007
THE CATHERINE JOHNSON AWARD FOR BEST PLAY 2007
The Pearson Playwrights’ Scheme is delighted to announce the winner of the first Catherine Johnson Award for Best Play 2007. He is James Graham whose play Eden’s Empire was written whilst attached to the Finborough Theatre.
The Pearson Playwrights’ Scheme, formerly known as the Thames Television Theatre Writers’ Scheme, is one of the most prestigious awards for new writing in British theatre. It awards up to five bursaries a year, each worth £7,000, to writers of outstanding promise and allows the playwright a twelve-month attachment to a theatre and commissions the writers for a new play. Recipients of the bursaries for 2008 will be announced later this month.
The Scheme also offers an award for the Best Play written by the five bursary winners from the previous year. This new award, worth £10,000, has been generously donated by Catherine Johnson, a graduate of the Scheme and herself the winner of the Best Play written in 1991. Catherine, who is a member of the judging panel for new bursaries and author of Mamma Mia, has been looking for a way to give something back to the Scheme which helped and encouraged her in the early days of her career.
Judges of the Pearson Award include Sir John Mortimer CBE QC, Dame Beryl Bainbridge, Catherine Johnson, Sue Summers, Thelma Holt CBE, Michael Billington, John Tydeman OBE and Jack Andrews MBE.
Previous recipients of the Pearson bursary over the last thirty years include Richard Bean, Alan Bleasdale, Gregory Burke, David Edgar, David Eldridge, Lee Hall, Jacqueline Holborough, Catherine Johnson, Charlotte Jones, Fin Kennedy, Hanif Kureshi, Nick Leather, Martin McDonagh, Gary Mitchell, Chloe Moss, Gary Owen, Joe Penhall, Winsome Pinnock, Billy Roche, Simon Stephens, Sue Townsend and Timberlake Wertenbaker.
Previous winners for the Pearson Award for the Finborough Theatre include Chris Lee in 2000, Laura Wade in 2005 for Colder Than Here which also won the Pearson Award for the Best Play, James Graham in 2006 and Al Smith in 2007. For three years running, the Finborough Theatre has been the only unfunded theatre to win a Pearson Bursary.
James Graham is Playwright-in-Residence at the Finborough Theatre. He has written three plays – commissioned by Artistic Director Neil McPherson for the Finborough Theatre - Albert's Boy (2005), starring Victor Spinetti, which earned James a prestigious Pearson Award bursary, Eden's Empire (2006) and Little Madam (2007). James was the Finborough Theatre’s nomination to the BBC and Royal Court’s programme for young writers, ‘The 50’, celebrating the Royal Court’s 50th anniversary. His original television comedy-drama, Caught in a Trap has been commissioned by producers Greenlit.
and...
Winner - The George Devine Award for Playwright-in-Residence and former Literary Manager Alexandra Wood 2007
Winner - The Pearson Award bursary for Playwright-in-Residence Al Smith 2007
Shortlisted for The Empty Space Peter Brook Award for Studio Theatres, and The Empty Space Peter Brook Mark Marvin Award.
Other Productions in 2007
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
by Michael Louis Wells.
Directed by Wilson Milam.
Produced by Louise Chantal.
Cast: Edward MacLiam. Kyle Soller. Anna Hope. Anthony Weigh. Stephen Darcy. Siobhan O'Kelly. Kate Miles.
A rehearsed reading of a new play.
13 November 2007
SHARON AND MY MOTHER IN LAW
Adapted for the stage by Afaf Shawwa.
Based on the book by Suad Amiry.
Directed by Razanne Carmey.
A rehearsed reading of a new play.
4 December 2007
"Perhaps one day I will forgive you for putting us under curfew for 42 days, but I will never forgive you for obliging us to have my mother in law with us for what seemed, then, more like 42 years."
Sharon and My Mother in Law follows Suad Amiry's journey from falling in love with Ramallah, with occupied Palestine and with a 36 year old professor at Birzeit University to the Israeli re-occupation of the already Occupied Territories in 2002.
Interview with Artistic Director Neil McPherson in The Gaiety Magazine, 2007,
on the Celebrating British Music Theatre series
Part of the reason for doing this is to get other producers and musical theatre people interested in these works and try to put them back into the mainstream. If we just do these for the next five years and we are still the only people who does them I would be disappointed. A major point to note about these musicals in general is that there is a lot of prejudice surrounding them.
Critical reception of the first three productions in the series seems to have been very positive!
Very good indeed. The Maid of the Mountains was a little disappointing because we did it in December so we didn’t actually get any national reviews because everyone was at the panto! Our commitment to new writing and doing quite hard hitting political stuff wherever possible means that critics are slightly more inclined to take us seriously because at the same time we’re balancing these musical comedies with plays about racism, genocide and so on.
The revivals have been staged at the Finborough so far have been wide ranging in scope: Florodora and Our Miss Gibbs were probably little more than names to the general theatre going public, whereas The Maid of the Mountains is still quite well known. With the latest productions the Finborough is now entering the earlier era of Gilbert and Sullivan. What criteria do you need to consider when deciding on which shows to revive?
We’ve deliberately taken away the 1870 to 1914 dates from the “Celebrating British Music Theatre” banner because if we wanted to do The Bohemian Girl, for example, that would be before, and when we wanted to do The Maid of the Mountains that was after. Because of the financial situation and the staffing situation – we only have the one full time paid member of staff and that’s me! – to some extent it has to be a matter of persuading a director to do it. In the end the director puts up some of the money, we put up the rest, but in the end it’s a huge amount of work for them so usually I present them with a general outline, show them some websites, give them a couple of CDs and say “go and choose one you like” within the boundaries of the period we’re working with.
In the end financially we have to have safeguards in place, so we can’t always do exactly what we’d like unfortunately. If anyone would like to make any donations, we are a registered charity and it would allow us to do some more! We had a nice donations for Our Miss Gibbs from Andrew Lloyd Webber, with the budgets were working to that makes a huge difference.
In some ways The Maid seemed a rather odd choice for revival in that it is still quite a familiar show to enthusiasts, having been revived and recorded a number of times and having remained in the repertoire of amateur societies up until the 1960s…
I think The Maid was well worth doing and we got a very good cast for it with Anita Louise Combe in the lead. It was actually a toss-up between The Maid of the Mountains and a Paul Rubens show called Mr Popple, but in the end we had to think of the financial demands.
From the substantial body of work created by both Gilbert and Sullivan what made you select The Zoo and Sweethearts for revival at the Finborough?
Of the Gilbert plays I’ve read that was the one that I liked the best! Part of the reason that we’re doing Sweethearts is that it was written for Marie Bancroft who is in the local cemetery. The Zoo was partly to do with the length. We wanted to do a Gilbert or Sullivan double bill and Haddon Hall would have been too long. As far as we can find out – although I’m sure somebody will correct me on this – The Zoo hadn’t had a proper professional production for a century so that was a major part of it as well.
You also recently revived Noel Coward’s The Rat Trap as part of the Finborough Theatre’s 2006 Forgotten Voices season in a production that was the first revival since the original in 1926. How well was The Rat Trap received?
Very well indeed and there is the possibility of a West End transfer. We’d love to go to the West End with The Rat Trap and certainly the work is good enough, we can tell that from the reviews and the sales. Whether we can find the people to actually make that happen is another matter. We don’t have the money to do it, so it would be a matter of finding a West End producer who’s interested in bankrolling that. I seem to keep going on about money and staffing, but we absolutely completely rely on a lot of volunteers!
We also have a T W Robertson play coming up in July. We’re doing Ours, the first production in London since something like 1904 so that should be rather interesting. Caste had already been done in about 1992 and we try to have a rule at the Finborough that if it’s been on in London in the last 25 years we don’t do it.
The last time we talked there was mention of commercial recordings as a possibility for the future…
Not much has happened on that as of yet, but it’s certainly something an ambition for the future. We’ve got private recordings, but obviously with Equity rules we can’t commercially release them. There was a bit of interest after Our Miss Gibbs, but obviously not for The Maid because of the recent commercial CD. It’s the money and the fund raising again. It’s really just a matter of having the time and the staff to pursue that properly and raise some money. Fund raising is a full time job and in the end we can either fundraise or we can do the show, but realistically if we had X thousand pounds that would be enough to fund a recording, we’d rather spend that on a show and do more of them.
What future plans are there for the Finborough?
We’ve got a very long list! At the moment we’re thinking of The Quaker Girl for the summer, then The Arcadians for a full four week run although I’m not sure when because that’s really going to cost, then possibly Haddon Hall. To do one of these shows costs about £2,500 and that’s with all the actors working for nothing; if we completely sell out we’ll just about break even. I think The Arcadians is about the only one that could hold down a full four week run for us, although Our Miss Gibbs actually might have done, but The Arcadians is the obvious one that springs to mind.
In a perfect world, if we could fund it, we’d be doing one every three months; we’d also maybe even go forward to the 1960s and try to cover more of the British musical theatre. We’d also like to move into opera, so we’re currently working on trying to bring some of Ethel Smyth’s one act opera, The Boatswain’s Mate and Fete Galante. That’s a more difficult area; getting opera singers is more difficult than getting musical theatre performers but that’s a whole different discussion!
