I was really interested to read Andrew Dickson’s article about the involvement of literary departments and agents in bringing new writing to the stage. NT Literary Manager Sebastian Born describes the process of knocking a script into shape as a ‘subtle, delicate and slightly unquantifiable business’ and I think this is born out in Peggy’s archive. This week I’ve been cataloguing papers from Peggy’s early career in which she gives very detailed feedback on the first draft of an Emyr Humphreys play. Peggy promised to go through the play scene-by-scene to indicate the changes that needed to be made but she was very disappointed with Humphreys’ revised version, conceding that the rewrites ‘merely make it more conventional and less interesting’. It just goes to show that textual analysis isn’t the only skill that an editor or agent needs. As Born says: ‘plays die if they're handled too much’.
I think this is a lesson that Peggy learnt early on and it may explain why her approach to dramaturgy was so unconventional. Later correspondence shows that she was just as likely to send a writer a gift to inspire them as she was to critique a script.
I was also intrigued by what Dickson sees as a swing towards producing scripts that have been submitted rather than commissioned. Peggy’s archive certainly reveals the agonies of commissioning: the heartbreak when a theatre decides they can’t produce a commissioned piece; and, most of all, the struggle to write to order. The Bush’s new social networking site sounds like a great way to bypass all this.
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