 And our final live session this afternoon is Jess Casey, who's an actor, a playwright and a literary manager. I'm not sure which role he's going to be in today. I'm looking for tears as little Nell dies. And he's going to talk to us about Be A Playwright.com and about the evolution of the project, moving online from offline, what they've done to create material and how that's engaging with audiences in ways that are about encouraging other people to tell their stories rather than just telling the story themselves. Good afternoon everybody. I am the literary manager of Live Theatre. I thought before I go into Be A Playwright.com which is our online script writing course. I should put the organization I work for into a context. That is, we're going to talk about later on, Be A Playwright.com. That's the home page. I work at Live Theatre, which if you're not familiar with Newcastle is a beautiful building down on the quayside. We were closed for renovation about three or four years ago and we got bigger. We acquired the building next door. So we've recently kind of expanded. We've got two spaces down there. We've got a main house which is 160-seater and we've recently acquired Studio Theatre, which is on our top floor, which is 60 seats. And we're a new writing company, one of very few in the country, and our mission statement is very clear. We have to create and perform new plays of world-class quality. We have to try and find and develop creative talent and we unlock the potential of young people through theatre. So we obviously, the second one of those missions, we have to find new ways of finding and developing creative talent all the time. So that's something to bear in mind when we get on to talking about Be A Playwright.com. I'll just go through a couple of the things that we do that kind of reinforce our mission. First Draft is a project we do with local schools. We go into schools and find writers, embryonic playwrights, who are nine and ten years old, years four and five. And our Education and Participation Department works with the young writers. They bring the writers into the theatre. We employ professional actors and directors to give them a proper production and they do a series of ten minute plays with usually two handers and they're performed to the highest possible standards that we can apply. And that's just part of the work that we do in our Education and Participation Department. We go out and also invite young people into our building. We run ten different sessions a week, eight of them in the building and two out in the community. And we have something like 200 people a week engaging with the department and we have a waiting list of a similar number. My job as literary manager is to find and nurture creative talent. We do this by engaging with writers in a variety of different ways. We have a thing called Live Lab, which is like a developmental arm of the company where we put work on in our studio space and we hope to do dramaturgical support for writers at all stages of their career. And we also teach an introduction to playwriting course, which I'll come back to later on. And of course in the main house we have our main productions. When the building reopened three or four years ago, it opened with the Lee Hall Play, the Pittman Painters, which was a massive success and has moved from our stage at Live. It's gone on to The National and from The National it went to Broadway last year and is currently on tour, I think in Blackpool this week maybe, and it's coming back to the West End in the autumn. So I suppose the theatre company does a whole range of disparate but coherent activities. And my job as the literary manager, one of the things I've been doing for the last few years, is from 2002 we've been running an introduction to playwriting course with my predecessor Jeremy Herron, who's now Deputy Artistic Director of the Royal Court. Jeremy and I ran the course for a number of years. We had probably about 120 people take part of all abilities and from those people who took part in the course we had about nine or ten professional commissions. So it seemed to be working rather well. And so we thought how could we roll out that course that we do, that we teach at the theatre. How could we roll that out online so that other people could have access to it. And perhaps also think about an income stream as I'm sure lots of people in the room are aware, funding opportunities are becoming more restricted. And so arts organisations have to look for alternative income streams. How to maybe charge people to come and witness the content of our course, make it adaptable so that they can engage with it and perhaps earn some money for the theatre company to enable it to put its plays on in the main house and the studio and to continue to further develop and support writers in the region. So we set about adapting the content of the course to the online course. We kind of rationalised the old content of the previous course into a five modular structure. These are the modules here. You can see here Getting Started where we ask people to do a skills audit about themselves as writers, how they work best and what would motivate them, the sort of themes that they might think about writing. To think seriously about dramatic structure and incorporate the old adage that there are only three rules to writing a play or telling a story and that's structure, structure and structure. And also to think about character, how do you make your characters three-dimensional and believable. Dialogue and theatricality, what makes your writing different from writing a screenplay or writing for television. And finally getting it produced, the last module, which is about thinking strategically about where you place your script, getting it finished, thinking about rewrite and overcoming writer's block. So in the adaptation of our course that Jeremy Herron and I taught, we had to think about what it is that makes a playwright. What is it and what does an embryonic playwright want to learn? Obviously Jeremy and I had had the content of the course but it's not an exact science becoming a playwright and in fact what we're kind of after is for people to think individually. So we wanted to create a variety of voices. So obviously our voices, Jeremy and mine, were as part of the course but also people might want to hear how other writers go about tackling those issues that I've just mentioned. So what we decided to do is to create some video content of really top playwrights that we really admired and also had something interesting to say and to begin to analyse how they tackle the issues that we raise in the course. So we wanted to encourage people to have access to a diversity of working methods. And the way in which we did this, we set about interviewing interesting writers and our first list of people are on the screen now. Leigh Hall who was associated with our company quite a lot, he wrote the Pittman painters and obviously has written an opera in Bridlington that you might have heard a bit about most recently. Sheila Stevenson, she has written The Memory of Water and she wrote a lovely piece for us last year about the artist Winslow Homer. Nick Grosso is a youngish playwright who works in a very unconventional way so we wanted to talk to him, he's written Peaches and Ingredient X which was done at the Royal Court last year. The Leigh Alan Plater who had a long association with us and is a master storyteller and we thought that he would obviously have great skills and great advice to impart to embryonic writers. Polly Stenham who's very young, she's still only 20 or 21 I think, she had a massive hit with her first play, That Face at the Royal Court a few years ago and that also transferred to Broadway. And Anthony Nielsen who is a writer and director, he creates work in a completely different way quite often through improvisation. So it was about compiling a list of a variety of information that people and students would have access to. In order to, in order that we were singing from the same hymn sheet as it were we asked people on the course to read the same plays so that we have a common currency that we can keep referring to in the content of the course. So those were the six plays that we asked people to read, we don't ask them to read them all at once, but they read them gradually as the course progresses. Obviously each of those plays has something new to offer to the embryonic writer. And we also created some audio content. We got a group of people who have been involved in some productions with of those plays to discuss them and we have those on the website as podcasts. So that people who are interested in, have just read the play have another angle to analyze it with by listening through that content. And so we had all of the content and then we had to kind of think about how best to kind of marshal it so that people could get the best use out of it. So we used testers and we used a focus group and we gave them the material that we'd compiled and asked them what they thought about it. And they provided us with a couple of things that we hadn't thought about. They wanted a kind of a dashboard, a kind of home page for each student to go back to. It's almost like a sort of Facebook home page where you could update your status and also say how you were progressing and leave comments about the course, communicate with other students. We created a series of forums where people could exchange opinions and also work if they wanted to and again talk to their fellow cohort of students and also have an interaction with the people who created the course, Jeremy and I. So every two weeks we have a live chat with students online and also they said that they wanted to have a sense of collecting what their work that they'd done. So they came up with this idea of an online journal which is where the modules have a series of exercises dotted throughout them and your answers to those exercises you can download and keep them in your online journal and you can slowly accumulate a whole wealth of written material as you progress through the course. And we also, we tried to set out what other competition there was out there and actually there are very few, there are very few courses that we could compare ourselves with. There's open university modules and what it would cost to do a kind of course at a university or part of a course at a university. And so we came up with two pricing structures. As you can see there was an interactive option which is the exercises that I've mentioned. At the end of each module you have a bridging exercise which you submit to us at the theatre and our literary department will pass on informed opinion about the exercise and then feed it back to you and then you carry on. And the last module, the final and fifth module we're asking people at the end to write a whole play. We hope that the knowledge that people have accumulated over all of the modules gives them a toolkit that they can use to write a play at the end of the final module. And they submit, in the interactive version, they submit that play to the department and we will provide a very detailed critique about the quality of the play, about how the play reflects the course, how much they have learned, maybe whether some of the weaknesses of the play may be and also to offer some advice about where they could place the play if they wanted to have it done professionally. And the solo option which is as you can see is cheaper, that doesn't involve the interaction. It doesn't have, you don't have interactive access to the forums and there wouldn't be the same interaction with the theatre to provide the kind of feedback from the course. But you do still do have access to all of the video content and the audio content that's on the site. Okay, so that's the course. What I'd like to do now is perhaps show you some of the video content rather than just hear me speak. It's got to be there somewhere. That's not it. It's a video stream. That's it. Brilliant. Okay, as you can see Stan Laurel and Ronnie Barker weren't available to do the introductions, but Jeremy and I did them instead. And these are some of the little video clips that we did of the extensive interviews that we do with the writers. This first one is with Sheila Steemson, just a little short clip and Sheila's explaining about how difficult it is even for a writer as esteemed as she is to write. I think basically you probably just sit at your rest till your head bleeds really. That's probably what the key is. And it's alright if you can't do it. I think that's what you have to own, the bits where you can't do it, where you just think, I don't know how to do this. I can't write any single play I've ever written. There's a point where I can't write it and then I phone up my agent and tell her I can't write plays anymore and I'm going to bed. I'm always going to bed. Or I can't write this play and I've given up her draft and it's worse. And she's just, you know, she just says you always do this. Do you remember you always do this? So one of the things that we were anxious to show the writers is the difficulties even great artists have. And the different approaches that they have, all these videos are from... I personally don't get one. Are from the first module. So this is the module in which we're asking people to evaluate what kind of writer they are and how you might go about starting to create that play that you want to write. This is Polly Stenham, who I say has only been writing for a short period of time. She's still very young, but she's had great success and has a really interesting way of writing. And this is what she says about how to start. Personally, don't get one clear idea. I'm really envy people who get one clear idea, but I don't. I think the best way to describe it and this is nicking it totally from another writer, Philip Ridley, is it's like a backwards explosion and you start with lots of little bits of detrus and then it kind of pulls back into something more singular. So I can't really answer that question because it's never, it's not the one thing really. I don't think. So when you sit down to apply yourself to this idea, what do you do? I just sort of freestyle. I know that's a weird word, but I just sort of write anything that comes into my mind and write lots and lots and lots and listen to lots of music and do lots of drawings and kind of gather and forage and then look, then stop and look at what I have and then peel away and then do it again and then peel it away and then eventually I get to see what I really meant all along but perhaps you become clearer about that with maturity, but I don't know. Okay, so these are I'll show you a couple more, but these are all videos from, as I say the same module and each of the five modules has particular videos that are tailored for that particular subject that's under discussion. Here's Nick Grosso and this is how Nick, these are all from Making a Start, so this is how Nick goes about pursuing an idea or not as the case may be. Alright, maybe we'll come back to Nick. Let's hear from Lee because he hasn't been in the news very much recently. Yeah, funny thing happened to me on the way to the cinema. Great, okay. It's alright. I'll just tell you literally what I do I literally have a huge if I've got an idea for a play or a screenplay or something I'm kind of, I think about it for quite a long time and generally, and this is another thing that Tom Stobald says that generally you get one idea and it's not quite enough and then you get another idea and suddenly a play is when there's like almost two ideas coming together. I'd always thought for instance a lecture is a seldom used form of theatre, but it's like it does happen in universities all the time people stand up with a bit of sign and something like that and I've always been puzzling how you could use that in a not a very arid way to be a theatrical form and then, and I've also I'm sort of obsessed about class and art and all the things that I keep going back to and then when I found the Pittman Painters suddenly I realised that there was a form here that could be a lecture, but it could be actually fun and animated and it could be a lecture about this other thing. And because these two ideas came together then there seemed to be a play there, but so what I do, once I've got a rough idea of these two ideas or the landscape I get a huge bit of paper and then I just free associate and I think that well if I'm going to tell a play about a boy who does ballet in a Pitt village, I think well he's going to have to talk to his teacher so alright a scene between the boy and his teacher and his dad's going to find out and he's going to have an argument with the dad and by the end of like an hour, if you ask that basic question, what's going to happen in any given scenario and you probably end up with 20 or 30 different ideas for scenes and when I went back recently to do me old paper I found that sheet of Billy Elliot and every single scene that's in the musical now is on that bit of paper because it's bleeding obvious, you know what I mean it's not like rocket science, he's got to talk to somebody he's got to talk to his little mate and he's going to ask him a question then I start to organise and see well if I've got all these things, what's going to happen first is he going to have an argument with his dad first or is he going to talk to his teacher and then asking those really dumb questions you start to find the implied narrative and quite often you'll change it as you go later on but you can start to see and then I literally draw so he sees his mam and then he goes down to that and then sometimes you don't know what you can't decide whether this you've come before that and I kind of I've got these alternative timelines and stuff so by the end of that process I know what my scenes would be, I'm thinking about the characters all the time although I'm not really I'm looking at the structure but a lot of the questions about the characters are answered by what I've discovered on my timeline as it were because we know that dad's going to have to be a certain type of dad so he can have the argument with them he's not going to be the type of you know little dad who's taking him to the ballet lessons obviously he's going to have to be something else so loads of questions are starting to get answered without you having to actually think about them and invent them and then when I've got all that then I start then I start doing other research about it what was actually like it in 1984 and Easington and stuff and getting pictures and looking at documentaries about how they train ballet dancers and stuff and doing that type of background research then informs oh well I couldn't possibly do that but that's wrong because the ballet dancers don't do that so then you start refining it but really all the work of writing the play is being done subconsciously at that point you're using this thing to sort of somehow get a grasp of the situation and in a sense I think what you should do is write something that's important to you okay so you can see that the videos themselves are quite practical they're about giving people a real insight into how these writers these particular writers work well try again with Nick because he's quite interesting starts with furniture I normally get an idea it really usually involves tables and chairs and by that I mean like just the place so I think of the place and the people like for example if it is a table and chairs that I just imagine the table and the people that are sitting on those chairs that's usually the basis of the play that's how it forms in my mind and so then what happens then you get the place I get the place I get the people and then I just get them talking to each other and I like to see what happens between those people what develops however with this play it was a little bit different in a sense that I had more of a long term picture of what was going to happen and where it was going to go but that's not always the case sometimes sometimes I have no idea where they're going to take this and sometimes I'll start something it doesn't take me anywhere so I don't take it any further and then sometimes I find a place and people who will I can sustain or they will sustain me long enough to get to the end of a play so as you can see there's a whole variety of different bits of advice being offered because as I mentioned earlier on what we're trying to encourage is the individual voice of a playwright with something new to say and in an interesting way so I suppose ideally what we're thinking will happen is that people will pick little things from all of the different bits of material that they get and think well that applies to me even if that doesn't apply to me so they're gradually accumulating the evidence the stuff that they'll need in order to fashion their play and as I mentioned earlier on there are a number of podcasts I'll just show you, just play a little bit maybe from a podcast this is the group discussion about Three Sisters, check off okay this is the Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov and it was first performed in 1901 so where should we start I suppose what we want to concentrate on are some things that are in the play that might be useful to budding writers Steve Well the most significant thing about I think about this play and other Chekhov plays and this isn't an original idea I think it was something that was quite shocking for audiences at the time is that this play in particular there is a lack of kind of narrative action and the foregrounding of character the emotional lives of character and ideas being kind of discussed and explored in a range of interesting ways and I think that's important because I think writers get very caught up with the idea that they need to have a driving narrative because that's the vehicle that's going to kind of carry everything else with it Sorry that's just a little extract from that and I suppose what we're doing is accumulating all the pieces of information from the writers and also things that could be learnt from these classic texts and building them together so that there's a kind of learning process for the course members to follow that kind of summation of what all of the course is about You will get a unique username and password to log on to the course When you do, you will be presented with a homepage that you can personalise by uploading an image to represent yourself You also have the ability to update your status view your progress on the course and see who else is online The course has been specifically written by myself, Jess Casey the literary manager at Live Theatre and Erin, now assistant artistic director at the Royal Court The course is designed to be a straightforward step by step guide to the craft of playwriting In each of the five modules you are taken through a number of specially tailored writing exercises on a particular aspect of writing plays culminating in a bridging exercise which you can submit for expert feedback from the literary department at the theatre In addition to the text the course also features exclusive reviews with award winning playwrights offering their own perspectives on the subject under discussion These writers include Lee Hall Sheila Stephenson Alan Plater and Polly Stenham Your exercises will be saved in your own electronic journal This journal can be used for your own notes and observations made during the modules You can also share your work and the journal with your fellow students within the discussion forum Here you can become part of an online community of aspiring playwrights The course culminates at the end of the fifth module with the opportunity to submit a full length play that you have written as a result of the skills gathered on the course This script will receive a thorough critique and feedback from the live theatre literary department with advice on the next steps for your work and development The solo version of the course is also available This contains the contents of the course the exercises and interviews and the contents of feedback advice and full access to the discussion forum Ok that's it, that's beaplaywright.com Thank you