Theatre West, Bristol’s excellent new-writing company, is 20 this year. And it’s celebrating in style, with a cracking autumn season and another prestigious award nomination, says Steve Wright.

Since it formed in 1990, Theatre West has staged 50 world premieres at Clifton’s Alma Tavern Theatre. Happily, the company’s in good health as it enters its third decade. For the second year running, a play from its autumn season has been selected for the Meyer-Whitworth Award – this time it’s Jimmy Whiteaker’s ‘Nostalgia’, upon which we lavished five stars last October.

And this autumn, as it has done every year since 1997, Theatre West has programmed a season of five brand new plays, each given a fortnight’s run in the Alma’s intimate 40-seater. For several years, company directors Alison Comley and Ann Stiddard arrived at the final quintet by sending out an open invitation for scripts and spending their summers reading through the deluge that flooded in: this year, they’re following the 2009 formula, a mix of commissions from new writers and invited scripts from targeted groups.

So the season includes three plays by handpicked writers – Edson Burton; Dom Rowe, a young Bristol playwright who has written for Bristol Old Vic’s ‘Short Fuses’ and others; and Steve Hennessy, a regular fixture in TW seasons past. Dom’s contribution is ‘A Laughing Matter’, a comedy about a pair of eccentrics at the far fringes of the entertainment industry; Steve’s ‘Venus at Broadmoor’ is the last in a cycle set inside the infamous high-security psychiatric hospital.

Elsewhere, Alison and Ann put out a call for scripts by women writers. From the 40 entries, they selected ‘Pavement’ by Bristol playwright Sharon Clark. A study of the conflicting ties of political activism and family life set in a dilapidated Cornish farmhouse, it’s inspired by Brian Haw, the peace protester who’s made Parliament Square his home since 2001. For the final play, the duo issued an invite to the members of local writers’ group Southwest Scriptwriters. The winning entry, Bruce Fellows’s ‘Rabbit Ears’, follows two Army wives waiting for news from the front.

The season kicks off, though, with ‘Children of Salt’ by Bristol poet/playwright Edson Burton. We’re in a nameless African country, still recovering from a genocide committed some years before. Abena, a widowed mother, strikes up a relationship with Kgosi, a likeable itinerant labourer who’s elusive about his past. Kgosi becomes a father figure to Ogun, Abena’s teenage son – but the boy begins to suspect some shadows in Kgosi’s past, particularly in relation to the Children of Salt, the cult responsible for the genocide. “Many people involved in that atrocity have disappeared and merged back into society, and Ogun begins to suspect that Kgosi may be one of them,” Edson explains. “He suggests as much to Abena, and this idea begins to play on her. Is there any truth to this, she wonders – and if so, how possible is it to forgive?

“I’ve always been fascinated, not so much by momentous events – massacres, atrocities etcetera – but by how people survive their aftermath,” Edson continues. “History becomes a ghost that can strangle what comes later. I want to explore these themes in a meaty way, but also in a credible way – I hope these three characters come alive, and aren’t just mouthpieces.”

It’s quite a thoughtful, ideas-led season, Venue ventures, with all five plays offering detailed insights into very particular lives with which most audiences will be completely unfamiliar. “That’s the joy of the Alma, in such a small space the audience invariably get much more drawn in,” says Ann. “And they are thoughtful plays – but all of them, in their different ways, are funny too.”

Alison and Ann feel that Theatre West is a constantly evolving project. “The more we work with writers, the more we produce, the more experience we gather, the better we do all of those things,” says Alison. “It definitely feels that we’re progressing, along with the writers we work with. Rather than inviting scripts, selecting five of them and producing them as they are, we now develop those scripts with the writers, dramaturgs and directors. And that means we can take more risks – we can think, ‘this writer’s got something interesting to say, and we can support them to turn that into a fully fledged play’.”

So all is well in the Theatre West camp. The annual question of whether or not they’ll get funding can make for a feast-or-famine existence, but Arts Council funding was forthcoming this year. “We’re still irregularly funded, but we’re still here” is Alison’s buoyant message. “We’ve lived on the edge for a long time, so there’s no point getting stressed abut it. We’re pretty proud of where we are. Another Meyer-Whitworth nomination, the partnerships with the Old Vic and Southwest Scriptwriters – our star is in the ascendancy.”

THEATRE WEST’S AUTUMN SEASON BEGAN WITH CHILDREN OF SALT (TUE 21 SEPT-SAT 2 OCT) BUT CONTINUES UNTIL 27 NOV. CHECK FUTURE ISSUES OF VENUE MAGAZINE FOR PREVIEWS OF SUBSEQUENT PLAYS IN THE SERIES. SEE WWW.ALMATAVERNTHEATRE.CO.UK FOR BOOKING DETAILS.
 

Copyright Steve Wright 2010

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