An interview with Beth Flintoff, Associate Playwright & Young Writers Associate
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Can you tell us a little bit about the Royal Court’s Young Playwrights award?
It's for any young person living in London, aged between 13 and 18, to send us a play - up to half an hour long. We had 153 plays sent in, and we sent feedback to every single entrant. And we have six winners, which are going to be on stage at the Royal Court next week, and they’re published by Nick Hern Books. Alongside the award, we ran a package of support: we went into 20 schools and youth groups, we did free workshops that a Royal Court playwright went in to deliver, and we also made a series of videos, all about 40 minutes long, that anybody could look at and they’ll support you in your journey to write a play. Quite a few schools then set up an afterschool club; the aim was that any teacher could run it, you could just open up the laptop and press go, and it basically ran the workshop for you.
What kind of plays have won this year?
Choosing the six winners was difficult. They are very, very high-standard plays, that felt like they represented a picture of London's teenagers. And some of them are so intensely theatrical! We had lots of plays about apocalyptic visions, and about what happens when a group of people are put in a small room or lockdown. We had lots of LGBTQI plays, but they often were about other things, but featuring relationships in all their forms. We had lots of plays about mental health issues, but a lot of them were quite positive, showing how they could work it out. And then we had quite a few comedies, that were just wild! Some of these writers have no fear, they were just writing next scene: the moon. It’s absolutely fantastic.
Will you be running it again, and if so, who can enter this prize – what if someone doesn’t think of themselves as a ‘playwright’ yet?
We will definitely be doing it again – the details will be announced and on all our socials in early autumn. We just want to encourage as many young people as possible to think of playwriting as an option. If you have a story within you, then we want to hear from you – if you are writing stories, you can also write a play.
Do you think more schools ought to be teaching playwriting, as a practical skill?
Our long-term mission is to make playwriting a part of young people's creative writing in schools. Young people do all the other forms of writing – stories, poems, essays – at school, but they don't write a play. I genuinely think that most teenagers come out of school thinking that playwrights are all dead! So we’re sending playwrights into schools, somebody who looks like them, basically to show anybody can do it. And most teachers have not gone through school writing for theatre either, so if we don't support them, how are they supposed to do it? I think it’s a very difficult thing to give feedback to a young person who’s written a play, if you've never had experience doing it yourself. So our videos do help with that.
How did you become a playwright?
I'd always written, but it genuinely didn't occur to me that I could be a playwright. I trained and worked as an actress, and then I was running the Watermill Theatre’s youth theatre – and we didn't have a play that the young people wanted to do. I was blessed with great bosses who said, why don't you give it a go yourself? I went, ok, and just did it. I started writing for youth theatres, and community and outreach shows, and it just built from there. But it was a slow burn for me: it wasn't until my thirties that I started writing plays, which is a shame.
What do you enjoy about writing for the theatre – and why should people give it a go?
When it works, it’s an incredible thing, seeing people being moved by something you've come up with in your shed… It's that shared live experience, everyone breathing in the same space, and that feeling of being moved just by people saying words on a stage. And I genuinely think young people love it – they just need to be told about it. I mean, young people are writing scripts all the time, aren't they, for social media? I think young people are out there and ready to write a stack of plays for us.
What are your top three favourite plays ever written?
Death of England by Roy Williams and Clint Dyer – just phenomenal! Posh by Laura Wade was quite seminal for me, it was the first time I read a play and I couldn't put it down. I recently saw 1536 by Ava Pickett and I found that just to be such an extraordinary and beautiful and devastating piece of work.