Free Spirit Theatre is coming!

Being a theatre producer is about lots of things, but one of them is letting go. There’s a truckload of preliminary work. For 'Light Delay' this meant getting the request for play submissions out there, dealing with all the submissions (we had over 300 and every e-mail needs to be acknowledged), answering any questions, reading and discussing the plays, helping compile the longlist, shortlist, finalists and, of course, selecting the final play. The venue needed to be arranged, ticket prices confirmed.

Then you move on to the budget, the Arts Council grant application, the casting call and auditions, the poster for the advertising. By this point you’ve invested a huge amount of time and effort and you have a pretty good idea of how you’d like the play to look and feel. But you know that’s not your call. That’s down to the director. And then rehearsals begin and things really start moving forward – except that you’re not needed at rehearsals. You’re not going to bond with the cast, because you’ll barely meet the cast. At this point, you have to start letting go. You may have built the boat, but now you have to stand on the shore and wave the cast and crew good-bye and let them do the sailing towards the opening night.

You’ve known this all along, but when that point is reached, it still hits home. Sure, you’ll still be needed to help out along the way, to offer encouragement and moral support if it’s needed (and even if it’s not needed, just to try and feel useful), maybe to help spend the grant if you got it. But you’re no longer key personnel.

There is no moral to this story, or any suggestions to how to approach this scenario – but if you are thinking of producing a theatre show, just be aware that it happens. Let it go - but don't freak out! And don’t let it stop you. I’ve already started planning the next one!

When I posted the ad for submissions of full-length plays to the ‘Playwriting UK’ Facebook page, I hadn’t anticipated that we’d go viral! Within days we’d received plays from Europe, USA, Canada, Russia, Australia and South Korea. To date we’ve received over 170 submissions, which is about 5 times more than we dared to expect. It’s fantastic and daunting in equal measure. If you are reading this and did submit – thank you, and bear with us while we get through them all.

This is the first time we’ve had to consider anywhere near so many submissions, fitting it in around our days jobs, so thank God we put in the ‘rule’ to pick out your best 10 pages for us to read first!

We’ve learned a lot in this process, especially about what to do to prevent your play going in the ‘Rejected’ pile, so to help out all you budding playwrights, here’s a few points we’d like to share. Some may seem obvious, but experience tells us they are not obvious to everyone 😊

1. Read the submission rules. We hate to reject anything simply because it doesn’t meet the rules, but equally it isn’t fair on everyone else if we choose something that doesn’t meet them. So if we ask for plays with no more than 10 actors, we have to stick to that. If actors can double up, then please specify this – don’t leave us to try and work it out, because we’re reading 1700-ish pages already and don’t have the time, so we’ll simply end up ruling you out.

For the length of the play, we know it can be difficult to know exactly how long it will run, and give latitude because of that, but if a play is over 200 pages long, it’s not going to be 90 minutes maximum, so unfortunately we can’t accept it, even if it’s brilliant.

2. Get it proof-read. If we read 10 pages and there are 3 or 4 typos, it puts doubt in our minds. If you’re careless with the presentation, are you careless with the characters, or the plot? When you’re up against 170 other plays, make sure we can’t find a reason to have doubt in our minds. At the very least get the 10 selected pages you want us to read proof-read. 

3. Include the character list, with ages/relationships/gender (if not obvious from the name). We don’t want to spend time working out if Bev is the son/daughter/father/mother of Lindsey/Stevie (Fleetwood Mac confused me as a kid). If your characters can be of any age/ethnicity, state that.

4. Include the synopsis. Basically this should be what we would print in the programme. We are your first audience, so tell us what a real audience would be told to put the play in context.

5. Put everything in one document. This is purely to make life easier for us. I download and then e-mail out the plays to our creative director. It saves us a bit of time if we only have to download then read a single document and we’re grateful for any time we can save.

6. Thank you for submitting all your plays – we really do appreciate it! Don’t be discouraged if yours doesn’t get selected – it doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t very good or that we didn’t like it, just that in the end, we can only choose one.

Happy Holidays!

Richard Shaw (Producer)