Bring on the crowds

THE Monsterists is a theatre writers' movement, club, campaign, "ism" and, we hope, an inspiration. It may have sprung from the need of our members to belong to the Secret Seven, but its aim is serious: to promote new writing of large-scale work for big stages. It's a positive, forwardlooking movement and we want to open debate as much as pressurise.

We don't want to whinge - though whingeing plays its part.

So what's the problem exactly?

British theatre might appear not to be getting much wrong at the moment, but big plays are not being written because theatres save their big-play budgets for the classics.

Living playwrights know this and censor themselves on all the aspects that make a play big: cast size, vision, subject matter, length.

A small stage and budget inevitably mean a small cast, fewer characters.

Writers are aware that when discussing a commission for a new play, one of the artistic director's most important questions is: "What cast size?" (Only the National and the Royal Shakespeare Company are virtually free of such restrictions.) This restraining aesthetic is the greatest threat to the future of British theatre since the invention of television. This Friday we have invited artistic directors and producers to our conference, A Monster Day Out, at Hampstead Theatre, to engage them in the debate.

The bog-standard new British play is an exercise in democracy. Three, four, or five characters each has an equal shot of stage time, each goes through a classic arc of development involving a moment when they are put under pressure, and usually each will have some kind of epiphany. It will last 90 minutes or less and there'll be no interval.

The marketing blurb would read: "Baz is off the Ritalin and has got a new job as a track-side marshal at the speedway where he meets Shaz who's just discovered Sartre. But when Baz's new flatmate Gaz moves in with his collection of Nazi memorabilia, their lives are changed for ever."

This flippant caricature has a whiff of scorn, but of the seven plays which I have had professionally produced, five of them fit this " democratic" aesthetic.

These "democratic" plays reflect our age in that the works themselves are politically correct models of egalitarianism. I can imagine a script meeting in a theatre where the literary manager might say to the playwright: "Shaz's part is a bit underwritten", but I can't imagine the author feeling free to reply, "Yes, I know, I've done that deliberately: the play's not about Shaz, it's about Gaz."

The average Shakespeare cast is 23.

Of course, they're not all threedimensional characters. There isn't time in one evening for 23 equally satisfying dramatic arcs. Some of his characters are there to serve other purposes. But today's new writers are fast approaching a point where we cannot even put the atom of society, the family, on stage, with the average cast now at 4.6 - and falling.

The Monsterists have some demands.

First we would like to see more resources going to living writers, and less to the dead. Hard funding times have recently hit, but these come after three better years for theatres, when some even had their budgets doubled.

The Arts Council funded the Monsterists to find out where that money went.

In the autumn season of 2004, there were 276 plays produced by our sample group of theatres. Of these productions 35 per cent were new, original works and the remaining 65 per cent were Shakespeare, other classics by dead writers, adaptations, or translations of classics by foreign dead writers.

Difficult to conclude, but there is a suspicion that a lot of money was spent on doing full-cast Shakespeare, Feydeau with more doors, and O'Neill with whisky chasers.

We've picked up an idea from playwright David Edgar: a tax on dead writers.

The levy would be charged to any theatre, or producer, putting on a dead writer. Let's say five per cent of box office to start the argument. The money would go to a central pot managed by the Arts Council which would distribute it to living writers with commissions for new plays for the large stages - not the studios.

Final demand. We'd like to see the best directors working with the current generation of writers on work aimed at the big stages. We haven't been on those big stages and they have. We're not arrogant enough to think we know how to do it, but they at least know how many lines an actor needs to get from the wings to centre stage.

IT WOULD also be good to see the very best actors in new plays. Kenneth Branagh was lauded for agreeing to do Richard III in Sheffield and I still don't know why. Is Sheffield that awful? Was the money that bad? For God's sake, it's one of the best parts in the box. We'll praise him when he gives his talent and boxoffice pull to support a new play.

We have a manifesto which outlines what a Monsterist play might look like.

It would show the story, not tell the story. This means the action is in the present tense and dramatic. It is then up to the audience to interpret meaning from the action, as opposed to being told by the author what to think. A Monsterist play would be unlikely to be polemical, though it would inevitably be political if it was dealing with big themes. The world would be presented as it is, a mucky, complex mess. Proselytising playwrights offering ideologies as solutions to complex human issues went out with the playwright's flares.

A Monsterist play would be inspirational and dangerous, but not sensationalist. If you're an audience member sitting in the stalls, spending 90 minutes working out how to get blood stains out of your best polycotton might be a visceral and legitimate theatrical experience, but if it's the whole of the play, then it's little more than Grand Guignol.

The challenging theatre movement, which was dubbed "In Yer Face" and served up by the likes of Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill, was a shot of adrenaline, but 10 years on anal rape has become the theatre cliche to replace French windows and the sofa.

Finally, if anyone thinks that the Monsterists spend their time sitting around writing manifestos, or doing surveys, let me put you right. We subcontracted the survey; we meet about twice a year; and have the world's worst website. Check out the manifesto at monsterists.com and you will realise how little time we spend on this campaign. We're all too busy writing.

. The Monsterists are playwrights David Eldridge, Moira Buffini, Roy Williams, Sarah Woods, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Colin Teevan, Ryan Craig, Shelley Silas, Jonathan Lewis and Richard Bean, whose new play, Harvest, opens at the Royal Court on 1 September.

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