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Playwright Simon Stephens is right – writers should take to the stage and make their voices heard, no matter how ugly it gets “The Bruntwood prize is a clarion call to all playwrights throughout the country,” declared playwright Simon Stephens in Manchester last night at the launch of the 2011 Bruntwood competition and the premiere of Vivienne Franzmann’s Mogadishu , one of the winners of the competition, open to all UK and Irish-based writers to write on any subject they choose. Stephens continued: “This year there is a real urgency to it. It’s the first time the award has been given under this new government and conditions of work for playwrights have changed. No government in my memory has taken such a sudden, clinical, brutish attitude towards arts funding. I can’t remember any government having such an attitude towards financial restrictions across the economy. I am fascinated to see the way playwrights throughout the country will use image and idea, irony, language, content and form to make sense of and dramatise this changed landscape.” Questions of how playwrights and theatre-makers can and should respond to the current political situation were also very much to the fore at last weekend’s Devoted & Disgruntled , which took place against the unfolding dramas on the streets of Cairo and – nearer to home for those attending – in Oxford Street, where police used CS spray on those protesting against corporate tax avoiders. With so much theatre taking place on our streets in protests over tuition fee rises (one of the sessions at D&D discussed whether a performing arts degree was worth £40,000), and with UK Uncut cleverly using situationist-style playful interventions to draw attention to tax avoidance, how is theatre to respond urgently and incisively to the times – particularly when plays take time to get written and productions must find a slot? The Royal Court’s Dominic Cooke may talk of “a desire for stories that address where we are now”, but the truth – with rare exceptions such as Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children – is that the journey from page to stage often takes months, if not years. If playwrights are going to stay on top of the times, they often have to be prescient rather than thoughtfully responsive. There are some signs of movement, with initiatives such as Theatre Uncut at Southwark Playhouse in March, which will offer a number of plays on the spending cuts by writers including David Greig, Lucy Kirkwood, Dennis Kelly, Mark Ravenhill and Jack Thorne, among others. The plays are available free to download from the Theatre Uncut website, and the idea is that productions will be staged all over the country, not just in theatre spaces, on 19 March. Theatre Uncut sounds like a terrific idea and I’m very much looking forward to seeing the plays, but Stephens may be right when he highlights that one of the good things about the Bruntswood is that it allows playwrights complete freedom to write the play they want to write, rather than the play a theatre tells them they should write, or one they feel gives them a better chance of getting a production. The rise of playwriting schemes and professionalised literary management over the last 15 years means that many writers are caught in a culture that encourages them to write in order to please rather than to please themselves. Not long ago a major mid-career playwright said to me that “we have a generation of playwrights so infantalised by theatre managements I worry that they won’t protest against the cuts”. I hope he’s wrong. If students can take to the streets to protest then playwrights should be able to take both to the streets and our stages to make their voices heard, but it’s a concern that the careerist nature of modern theatre – where writers are treated like cogs in a machine, and the small company hopes to become a larger company slowly but surely climbing the funding ladder – creates a passivity to the often deeply conservative management systems and structures that have become the norm in theatre. As the playwright Naomi Wallace has suggested: “theatre, embroiled as it is in mainstream cultural and economic pressures, tends to reward and applaud those who ask questions that allow for its continued existence, albeit it with a few adjustments here and there. But overall the status quo stands largely untouched: heterosexuality continues to be foregrounded; white privilege continues to go unquestioned; writing against injustice continues to be sidelined; and to question our most deeply felt assumptions is, finally, deemed unproductive, not to mention impolite.” I hope that playwrights and other theatre-makers will heed Stephens’s clarion call, and that they will do so in the most impolite fashion possible. Theatre Arts funding Protest Egypt Students UK Uncut Tax avoidance Lyn Gardner guardian.co.uk