A NEW APPROACH TO LIVE DRAFTS

Theatre is a live art form. Something you experience with strangers, friends, lovers, or family in a room together. So to make the most exciting new theatre, we think it needs to be tested, explored, and shared live too. There’s only so much you can get from reading a draft script, or from hearing artists pitch their idea.

We think a new piece of theatre is best developed in a room with other people, who can laugh, yawn, question, cry, or hold onto their neighbour as they watch. All these reactions and responses are so useful for an artist, and for us as producers, to understand what the show is and what it might be, and to transform it into its final form – to turn a “Live Draft” into a finished show.

For the past few years, we’ve been presenting these Live Drafts in the form of festivals or mixed bill nights, with a few new ideas bunched together over a day or week. This was great, and we presented work from an incredible line-up of artists like Edythe Woolley, Pecs Drag Kings, Dipo Baruwa-Etti and Marikiscrycrycry and many of their ideas have become fully-fledged productions in our theatre.

But we learnt as a team and from artists that it didn’t give us (or the ideas) much breathing room. We couldn’t invest very much money into each idea and sometimes it felt a bit like a cattle market, or a Britain’s Got Talent audition.

So we’ve decided to shake it up and have Live Drafts pop up throughout the year, with one new idea shared over a night or two, and plenty of space for us all to reflect on what we thought about it. We’ll have a bit more money to support the ideas, and we can give the artists more space to rehearse as well.

We did this for other Yard Commissions like Lucy McCormick’s ★★★★★ Lucy & Friends and Selina Thompson’s new show about adoption, TWINE – and we’ll be doing this for Wet Mess’ Topsy-Turvy now too. We hope you’ll join us for Wet Mess’ Live Draft, and all the other future Live Drafts we hold in the theatre. We also hope you’ll talk to each other, to us, and the artists about the show afterwards (in the bar, or online) so that when it comes back finished, it has a little bit of you baked into it too.