Hello, and welcome to The Crush Bar, a newsletter about theatre written by Fergus Morgan.
This is the free, Friday issue, which usually contains a Q&A with an exciting theatremaker or an essay on a theatre-related topic. This week, there is an interview with Stewart Pringle, senior dramaturg at the National Theatre, whose new play The Bounds opens at Newcastle’s Live Theatre next week. After that, there are your usual three show recommendations.
In case you missed it, here is Tuesday’s issue of Shouts And Murmurs, which is a weekly round-up of the most interesting reviews, interviews and articles on theatre elsewhere…
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Playwright and dramaturg Stewart Pringle has several strings to his bow.
Born in 1985, he grew up in rural Northumberland, studied at Cambridge and Oxford, then moved to London where he ran Islington’s Old Red Lion Pub Theatre for eight years, alongside reviewing theatre for Exeunt, The Stage and TimeOut. He became a dramaturg at the Bush Theatre in 2016, then at the National Theatre in 2018, graduating to senior dramaturg in 2022. Alongside all this, he writes plays – Trestle won the Papatango Prize and was staged at Southwark Playhouse in 2017, and his new play The Bounds is about to premiere at Newcastle’s Live Theatre before transferring to the Royal Court – and Doctor Who audio dramas for Big Finish. His latest, co-written with his wife and fellow theatremaker Lauren Mooney and playwrights Dan Rebellato and Tim Foley, and starring Paul McGann, was released yesterday.
You do so much stuff, Stewart. You are a senior dramaturg at the National Theatre. You write Doctor Who audio dramas with Big Finish. And you write plays, too. What does your working life look like?
My job at the National Theatre is full-time. I’m in the office or a rehearsal room five days a week for that, from 10am until 6pm, sometimes longer if I’m seeing a show. I have to fit everything else, whether its writing for Big Finish or writing my own plays, around the edge. Right now, I’m taking annual leave so I can be in Newcastle for the premiere of The Bounds. With Big Finish stuff, which I do with Lauren [Mooney, writer, co-founder of Kandinsky, and Pringle’s wife], I can write for an hour in the morning or the evening or pull an all-nighter because it is very planned. Playwriting requires a different kind of focus. I have found that I need to take time off to get some mental headspace so I take some annual leave.
What does being a senior dramaturg at the National Theatre involve? You get to the office. You have a coffee. You answer some emails. Then what?
It depends. Some days, I am in rehearsals, taking groups away to work on scenes. Other days I’ll be involved with workshops. We just had a workshop for a new Jim Cartwright play, so I spent quite a few days with him and Nick Bagnall developing that. Often a day will involve a combination of reading plays, meeting writers, watching sharings, and chatting with other teams. We have a lot of meetings about programming. There is a certain amount of going to see other stuff as well. I was in Budapest a couple of weeks ago for a conference and some shows. It’s a nice job.
I’ve been at the National Theatre for ages, though. That situation might change in the next year or so. I want to make more time for writing. I’m going to be 40 next year and I need to get a bit of a wiggle on in all sorts of directions.
How do you think the National Theatre will change when Indhu Rubasingham becomes artistic director next year?
I don’t know. I’ve got my first proper meeting with Indhu via Zoom tomorrow, actually. I know her really well. We’ve worked on stuff in the past. I was delighted by her appointment. I actually asked her if she was going to go for the job a year and a bit ago, and she said: “Why the fuck would I do that to myself?” But she has.
I don’t think there will be sudden, cataclysmic changes, but there will be a course adjustment over a few years, just like when Rufus [Norris] took over. We will slowly see a new approach and a new stable of artists, but nothing will change overnight.
Why do you write plays? And do you find it hard not to be critical of your own work?
I don’t write because I have something to communicate or because I think my point of view is valuable. I write because I want to find out something. I want to deconstruct something. I want to explicate something. I want to bounce something off an audience. For me, playwriting is having a bunch of questions that relate to one another and exploding them in a way that people can engage with. I think that theatre is a place for questions and hard problems, not answers and polemic. It is about finding new ways of thinking. It’s about going on a rollercoaster together.
Tell me about The Bounds, then. What are you trying to explore?
There was a bunch of different stuff that floated together for The Bounds. I was thinking about tribalism and love for the place that you come from, and confusion for it, too. I was thinking about that feeling of being on the outside and never close enough to the centre of power where decisions are made that affect your life. I was thinking about our love for broken things, like football teams that don’t win or crappy television shows that are not that good. I was thinking about ideas of deep time. And I was thinking about all of this in relation to the North East.
I hit upon this image of two very bad football players in a game of Tudor football, standing on the fringe of the action because they are too shit to play properly, unaware that they are at the turning point in history that is the English Reformation. It is one of these long games that villages played against each other and looked nothing like modern-day football. They call it Shrovetide football or Whitsuntide football. It is still played in heritage forms in some places, although not Northumberland. I spoke to Professor Steven Gunn at Oxford University about it a bit. Slowly, all of these things I’d been thinking about the North East, from Brexit to gentrification, coalesced around these characters in this football game.
It is transferring from Newcastle’s Live Theatre to the Royal Court Theatre. How did that happen?
My last play, Trestle, was produced by Papatango in 2017. I actually had another play called The Guisers that was going to be staged by Papatango in 2020, but the world ended. Maybe I will rework it in the next couple of years and it will still get produced. It is very Brian Friel-y. It is very naturalistic and quiet. I’ve also written a play about my grandfather, which might be going into production later this year.
The Bounds, though, was a bit of a side-project. I wrote the first half in 2018, got stuck, came back to it in lockdown, and finished it then. Then it was quite a normal process. It got longlisted but not shortlisted for the Bruntwood Prize. My agent sent it out to all the usual places. You never really expect anything from that these days, but Jack McNamara at the Live Theatre really liked it. We got talking, discovered we had similar tastes, and he agreed to produce it. Then, just after he’d got the job at the Royal Court, David Byrne asked to read it. He texted me while I was on holiday in Norway with Lauren and said: “I fucking love your play. I’m going to try and do something with it.” I was so excited that I tied my bootlaces up badly and ripped off my middle fingernail somehow. David and Jack agreed that we could make it up here, then take it down to the Royal Court.
How did you first get into theatre?
I was in 1985 in Allendale, which is a beautiful little village in the middle of the Northumbrian Dales, midway between Newcastle and Carlisle. It is an old lead mining town with an incredible history, which my family has been involved with for a long time. I went to school there, then in Hayden Bridge nearby. I loved horror movies and ghost stories growing up. I found theatre through this fucking amazing drama teacher called Mike Fry, who loads of people in the theatre industry would credit as an inspiration. He was a remarkable man who took us to see shows in Newcastle, often out of his own pocket. There was so much theatre here then.
Mike directed us in shows, too. One year, I played Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Sweeney Todd in Sweeney Todd, and Edmund in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. We took them round village halls. People turned up for a three-hour version of Long Day’s Journey with teenagers and old farmers. It was bonkers.
I first met you when you were running the Old Red Lion Pub Theatre in Islington. How did you end up there?
When I was fifteen, I wanted to work in Forbidden Planet in Newcastle and sell horror films. Mike told me to apply to Oxford, though, so I did, and I got in. I did a lot of theatre there. Tom Littler directed me and Matt Trueman in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2005. I gravitated towards unfashionable people doing experimental theatre. We performed the entire script of Top Gun. We tried to do Jurassic Park but stupidly applied for the rights and got a cease-and-desist letter.
I then went to Cambridge and did a masters. Then I moved to London, did a teaching job, did a marketing job, did a lot of reviewing for Exeunt, did some shows and started London Horror Festival with a company called Theatre Of The Damned that I started with a friend. Then I got fired from my marketing job. The job at the Old Red Lion came up and I went for it. That was my first job in theatre.
I remember seeing some great stuff at The Old Red Lion when you ran it.
With a space like that, you can’t really programme in a normal sense. You programme in a reactive way, based on what people approach you with. I made some good early connections with people like Simon Longman and Clive Judd and John O’Donovan and Sean Turner and Max Barton, and so I was fortunate in that I ended up with a good bunch of semi-regular collaborators. Sean Turner came to me and said: ‘I’ve got this unproduced Arthur Miller play and I’d like to do it here.”
I was killing myself with that job, though. It is tricky to keep a pub going, let along a pub with a functioning, 40-seat theatre attached. You just can’t make it work. There was no money. The hours were insane. I was drinking too much. Lauren saw a job as a dramaturg at the Bush Theatre and encouraged me to go for it.
In your time at the Bush Theatre and at the National Theatre, what shows are you most proud of shepherding from page to stage?
I’m really proud of what we achieved with Arinze Kene’s Misty at the Bush. That was in development before I got there, but we really dug in and made it happen. At the NT, I’ve worked on a bunch of shows in different ways. I was a big champion of Sarah Gordon’s Underdog. I’ve worked with Lyndsey Turner on everything she has done here recently. I worked a lot with Tim Price on Nye and with Beth Steel on Till The Stars Come Down. I worked on The Ocean At The End Of The Lane and Dear England a little bit, too. To be honest, taking something all the way from first idea to final production does not happen very often because of the timescales involved.
What is your perspective on the landscape for new writing in this country?
I think it is really fucked in lots of ways. There are not fewer opportunities to have plays produced at the big producing houses. The National Theatre is doing as much stuff as it ever has, and soon the Royal Court will be, too. What is missing is the early development opportunities that used to be so common. Over the last ten years, they have been blown away. That has resulted in this zero-sum game, where it feels like you are either in or you are out. There used to be this lively, fascinating critical conversation about shows, too. You would do a show and then there would be this long tail of feedback and analysis. That has also totally disappeared.
I am hopeful, though, because I think we have some great people in leadership roles. I think what David Byrne is going to do at the Royal Court is going to be amazing. I think Indhu will continue building the NT in an exciting way. The musical chairs are in movement and we have some of the best minds we could possibly have working on theatre’s problems. Now we just need more sympathetic minds in government to support those leaders in rescuing this troubled ship.
The Bounds is at Newcastle’s Live Theatre until June 8, then the Royal Court Theatre from June 13 until July 13. For more information, click here.
Free subscribers to The Crush Bar receive these emails every Friday. Paid supporters also receive Shouts and Murmurs on Tuesdays.
Three shows to see next week
English – Royal Shakespeare Company/Kiln, until June 29
Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey’s reign at the Royal Shakespeare Company is off to a flying start. After acclaimed stagings of Love’s Labours Lost and The Buddha Of Suburbia, comes the UK premiere of Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play English at The Other Place, the company’s third Stratford-Upon-Avon auditorium. Set in an Iranian English class, it uses four students and their teacher to explore ideas of language, communication, migration and more. Critic Anya Ryan gave it five stars in The Times and praised its “meticulous detail.” You can get tickets for its London transfer to the Kiln in June here, and for its Warwickshire run via the button below.
The Land That Never Was – Camden People’s Theatre, until May 22
Liam Rees is an Edinburgh-based theatremaker who has collaborated with the experimental company Ontroerend Goed and the acclaimed director Milo Rau. This solo show, which is supported by Scottish company Vanishing Point, tells the real life story of soldier and conman Gregor MacGregor, who invented and made money out of a totally non-existent Central American country in the mid-nineteenth century. You can get tickets for its premiere at Camden People’s Theatre via the button below.
Dead Girls Rising – various, until June 11
This gig-theatre show from playwright Maureen Lennon, musician Anya Pearson, and Hull-based company Silent Uproar, who had a hit with Jon Brittain’s A Super Happy Story (About Feeling Super Sad), is touring England and Scotland for the next month. It focuses on two women – Katie and Hannah – at three different stages of their lives, working in themes of true crime and Greek mythology in an “explosive exploration of what it takes to live and survive within a violent patriarchy.” It is in Glasgow this weekend, then Edinburgh next week, then Marsden, Horbury, Newcastle, Liverpool, Hull, Manchester and Sheffield. You can get tickets via the button below.
Free subscribers to The Crush Bar receive these emails every Friday. Paid supporters also receive Shouts And Murmurs on Tuesdays.
That’s all for this issue
That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue – or anything at all, really – just reply to this newsletter or email me at [email protected]. Or you can find me on Twitter/X, where I am @FergusMorgan.
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