WhatsOnStage playwriting prize

Well that’s a disappointment. It was very obviously meant as an amateur prize and I had even a funny little idea I was gonna work on and maybe have sent something in. Even not then it’s a nice creative exercise for people in these queer times

I guess David’s real fear is that with lots of people off
work it could give the chance for someone with real raw talent to upstage him. I’ve never heard of him not seen anything he has done but now il remember him as the one that stole (amateur playwrighting) Christmas!

I do agree though. As I understand the average fee for a script is between £5000 and £7000. To be asked to work for one tenth of that is very insulting. Of something is good enough for a xo petition then surely you'd wait and go through other channels and get paid the proper fee!

This is such a shame. It was very clear, to me at least, that they weren't offering a fee for 'working on' a play, they were offering a very nice prize for an amateur to have a go. As the originator of the thread said this happens all the time in prose and poetry and people take part in unpaid open mic poetry nights/competitions. I would think it very mean spirited to view it any other way but then some people, particularly at the moment, seem determined to view things negatively.

The open mic comparison is good. There is a comedy club in my road that runs open mic slots for aspiring stand-up comedians, unpaid. One of the UK's most famous stand-ups also lives in my road - he hasn't complained that the open mic people should be paid £5000 for their sets like he would be which is exactly what Eldridge is suggesting.

I didn’t get the impression at all that this was aimed at amateurs who just fancied doing something creative to pass the time. Competitions like this are generally aimed squarely at professional emerging writers.

And you have to look at things in context. There are a thousand playwriting contests (aimed at aspiring/emerging career playwrights) that ask the earth and have insane restrictions yet offer very little reward. This is not a one-off, it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Most playwrights are not middle class, unless you mean only the famous ones. Discrimination and class barriers and the many insidious ways those barriers are enforced within theatre is something I research and talk about as part of my daily job. There are so many ways emerging writers and especially women or those from marginalised backgrounds get treated like crap. I could tell you stories that would curl your hair. That’s why practically the entire playwriting community is up in arms about this, because we know all these stories and we’re looking at it in a different context.

It’s easy to look at it out of context from the outside, and see it as a nice little thing. But for those of us who live in this world and rely on it, it’s part of a pattern of new writers being treated badly and disrespected in a hugely discriminatory system.

I don’t understand why David is being singled out for such nastiness when hundreds of playwrights (including many unknown/emerging playwrights) were equally if not more vocal in criticising this competition.

Well how are you defining “professional”? Very few emerging or even mid-scale writers earn a living from writing. You appear to be making a distinction between people trying to pursue writing as a career who aren’t yet earning money from it, and people with no desire to be career writers who can just knock out a full-length play as a bit of fun and way to pass the time. This competition is aimed squarely at the previous category. I doubt many people in the latter exist.




Nonsense. “Open mic events” already exist for playwrights. I’m helping out with one this evening. They’re called short play nights and are extremely common. There are a thousand events where aspiring/emerging writers can submit ten-minute plays for a one-off performance as a way to develop their skills, test their work in front of an audience, network with fellow creatives like actors, and have something to invite agents to. Absolutely no one objects to them or insists they should be paid or paid more than a token sum. That’s the equivalent of an open mic night, not this.

This is the equivalent of expecting an aspiring comedian to do a two-hour set (which must be brand new; pre-existing material banned!) at the Hammersmith Apollo and if they’re good you might give them £500.

Accepted practice/industry standard is that you don’t ask for a full-length, written-to-purpose new play without a standard commission fee. The normal way competitions like this work is to ask people to submit a one-page pitch/plot summary and ten pages of the script. The winner then delivers a full script. (Or to ask people to submit previously written full-length plays.) It’s baffling that WhatsOnStage decided not to follow industry norms, and doing so would be far more effective in encouraging “amateur” writers to enter. (Writing a full length play is HARD. The idea that loads of amateur hobbyist writers will be able to dash off a full-length play just for fun within the time period is naive.)

Surely coming up with an idea and a plot and writing the first ten pages would be just as satisfying for your “amateur writers” who just want a creative way to pass the time in lockdown, as writing a full play? Nothing stopping them from writing the rest of it if they want to.

But are those truly "amateurs" (ie people with no desire or ambition to write as a career, who are doing it purely as a fun hobby and a way to kill some time), or people who are trying to pursue writing as a career but haven't yet reached the level of earning an income from it? I bet anything if you looked at those novella entries, most would be from people who were at least somewhat serious about trying to become novelists. And the rest would be passion projects that people had been working on for months or years, not written specifically for the contest.

To be very clear, and this is important: no one is objecting to the contest itself, or to the prize money. No one is saying "WhatsOnStage shouldn't run this contest unless they can pay £5,000!!"

They’re saying “the contest/prize money is fine but WhatsOnStage should follow industry norms and either only ask for a plot summary and first ten-pages, OR accept previously written plays."

ETA- WhatsOnStage’s stated that this award was created to give a aspiring playwrights a platform and a professional production opportunity. Strongly implies it was not aimed at casual hobbyists just doing it for fun and to fill some spare time.

The thing is, most playwriting competitions are "no experience necessary." That includes huge, prestigious playwriting awards which are known as career-makers. "No experience necessary" doesn't mean it's aimed at casual hobbyists. There's nothing stopping the casual hobbyist who only writes for fun from submitting to Bruntwood or VBA. If a hobbyist is able to write an amazing play, that's great! But those awards were created with the intention of giving a profile and a career boost to emerging writers who aren't yet established but are serious about pursuing playwriting professionally. If you enter as a hobbyist you'll be competing against professional playwrights with buckets of experience, past professional productions and MFAs in Theatre and all sorts of other advantages.


And writing a full-length play is hard. Everyone thinks they can write a book or a play, but very few do. Why? Because most people have no idea how hard and demanding it is to even finish a first draft of a full-length work (which is why poetry and short story writing is so popular), let alone go through the whole redrafting and editing process. That's why zillions of people have the first few pages of something they started and abandoned languishing in a drawer somewhere, or a really great idea for a novel they've been meaning to start writing down for the last 10 years.

Having said that, I feel like we're getting sidetracked into an interesting but irrelevant side path. The point remains, this competition was explicitly designed in order to provide a professional platform for people pursuing a career in playwriting. Not a hypothetical hobbyist.

The request that WhatsOnStage make a minor change to their entry criteria in order to bring their competition in line with industry standards doesn't exclude any hobbyist writers from applying; in fact it does the opposite. So why the vitriol towards people who have already achieved success for wanting theatre competitions to be more open and accessible to those who are starting out?