Abbey Theatre - Amharclann na Mainistreach

The New Playwrights Programme is now in its third year. This programme is designed to support a number of talented emerging playwrights, to select promising playwrights who have come to the attention of the Abbey Theatre and nurture and develop their talent through an intensive artists development programme over eighteen months.

The Abbey receives up to 400 unsolicited scripts a year and the most promising writers from among these script submissions are offered a place on the NPP. Members of the Literary Department also attend a large number of productions, play readings and workshops of works-in-progress every year and these provide another of source of promising playwrights for the programme. (Find out more about submitting a script.)

The participants on this year’s New Playwrights Programme are Neil Bristow, Amy Conroy, Clare Dwyer Hogg, Damian Kearney, Tara McKevitt and Lydia Prior.

‘The New Playwrights Programme at the Abbey Theatre is a unique opportunity for gifted playwrights to immerse themselves in the craft of playwriting. At the national theatre we are committed to developing and producing new plays and new playwrights. This annual programme is a serious and long term investment in Irish writers,’ said Aideen Howard, Literary Director at the Abbey Theatre.

The programme provides participants with intensive artistic development in all aspects of writing for the stage. The selected playwrights will partake in a series of eighteen to twenty workshops, talks and masterclasses with leading international theatre practitioners and Abbey writers, directors, actors, and designers. Guest speakers/facilitators on last year’s programme included Patrick Mason, Paul Mercier, Brian Singleton, John Comiskey, Lynne Parker, Conall Morrison, Mark O’Rowe, Tim Crouch, Tom Murphy, Carmel Winters, Marina Carr, Annie Ryan, Michael West and Fiona Shaw among others.

The workshops cover all areas of playwriting including structure and form, language and dialogue, characterisation, writing the first draft, revision and rewriting, collaboration with other theatre artists and many other related areas. In taking this approach, the programme looks to cultivate and nurture a new wave of emerging playwrights for the Abbey and for Irish theatre with support from the country’s only full-time literary department.
The participants will have the opportunity to watch rehearsals, see behind-the-scenes of new plays commissioned by the national theatre and attend opening nights. In this way, they will acquire an in-depth knowledge of theatre and be exposed to the breadth of collaborative work that goes into staging a play.

As a central part of the programme, each participant will also write a new full-length play. As they work on their plays, the writers will receive regular feedback and support from the Literary Department, including a full developmental workshop of their play at The Abbey. This unique mix of elements – the frequency and variety of the workshops, the access to a wide range of leading international theatre figures and the continued dramaturgical support – makes the New Playwrights Programme the only one of its kind in Ireland. ~

Keep an eye out on this website for upcoming blogs and news from this year’s programme.

2011 New Playwrights Programme Participants

Neil Bristow was educated in Dublin and graduated with a degree in English Literature. He is a previous participant in the Rough Magic Seeds Programme, during which his play ‘Snap’ had a staged reading at the Dublin Fringe Festival. His most recent play, ‘Double Bound’, received a rehearsed reading in Berlin in 2010. He also works as a script reader.

Amy Conroy has been a professional actor for over ten years and during that time has worked in a devising, improvisational capacity on several shows. The most recent example of this work is ‘The Blanch’, a satirical buffoon show with Carpet Theatre Company. Amy’s first radio play, ‘Hold This’, was recorded and broadcast on RTE Radio One in September 2010. ‘I (heart) Alice (heart) I’ is her first stage play which she wrote, directed and performed in, winning ‘The Fishamble Award for New Writing’ in the Absolut Fringe Festival 2010.

Clare Dwyer Hogg is an award-winning journalist as well as a playwright. Clare has written two plays currently in planning for productions with Field Day Theatre Company. Clare has written for publications such as The Observer Magazine, NYLON magazine, Intelligent Life, The Independent, The Independent on Sunday, The Sunday Telegraph and the Irish Independent.

Damian Kearney is an actor as well as a playwright and his most recent acting credits include ‘Freefall’ (Project Arts Centre andAbbey Theatre), ‘The Comedy of Errors, The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui’ (Abbey Theatre) and ‘Peter Pan’ (Source Arts Centre). Film and television credits include ‘The Tudors’, ‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley’ and ‘The Fitz’. Damian has also written plays ‘The Flamboyant Bird’, ‘Great Little Spike’ and ‘Dad-Man and Trudy’ for Percolate Writers’ Group and the Project Arts Centre.

Tara McKevitt is from Moville in Co. Donegal and holds a BA, a Post-Grad in Journalism and an MA in Drama & Theatre Studies. Tara lived in Glasgow for over ten years and worked in TV post production for BBC Scotland. In 2010 she was shortlisted for the Tron Theatre Open Stage Competition for her play ‘junk’. In 2010 she won the RTÉ PJ O’Connor Radio Drama Award for her play Grenades. The stage adaption of ‘Grenades’ is being performed in Ireland and Scotland during 2011 with Mephisto Theatre Company.

Lydia Prior was born in Dublin and grew up there and in Belfast. She read Classics at Magdalen College, Oxford, and in 1996 her play ‘The Call’ was produced at the Royal Court as part of the Young Writers’ Festival. The following year, her second play won the Oxford New Writing Festival and was staged in Oxford and Belfast. She also co-wrote an adaptation of Aristophanes’s ‘The Birds’ for the Oxford Playhouse. In 2000, Lydia went to Los Angeles to do an MFA in Screenwriting, which she completed in 2003. Several film and TV scripts later, she returned to playwriting. Now based in London, she took part in the Next Stage residency at the Dublin Theatre Festival in October 2010. Recent productions include an extract from her new play, ‘Marbles’, at Soho Theatre in London and the devised piece ‘I Dreamt Tom Stoppard’s Email Address’ which she also performed at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin as part of the festival, The Theatre Machine Turns You On Vol. 2.