Francis Beckett, author of The Prime Ministers Who Never Were, What Did The Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us? and How To Create A Successful School on his unfortunate experiences with ageism as a playwright, and the university course behind it.
A move from writing books to writing plays has brought me face to face with rampant ageism.
I’ve not seen a lot of it in book publishing, but I find that launching a playwriting career in one’s sixties makes me a real oddity. I’m in favour of encouraging bright young new playwrights, but I hate to see the waste of bright old playwrights.
It’s not that we’re out of touch. My latest play The London Spring imagines London after a few more years of inequality, economic decline and neoliberal government, in which Londoners are reduced to begging in the streets from wealthy foreign tourists. It speaks to contemporary concerns in a way that a lot of work by younger writers doesn’t.
Novelists and their publishers manage these things much better. Marina Lewycka published her first novel, the hysterically funny A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, at the age of 58. Three more novels from her have shown this was no flash in the pan. My old journalist chum Wendy Wallace’s first novel The Painted Bridge is out from Simon & Schuster in May, and if the quality of her reportage is anything to go by, it will at least be powerfully written. I know two other fifty-somethings with new novels on their way from prestigious publishers.
Yet the older playwrights of whom you have heard – Howard Brenton, David Hare, David Edgar and the rest - made their reputation in the seventies or even earlier.
Is this because of the relative youth of the men and women who run new writing venues? I have noticed an instinct to speak to me loudly and clearly (rather appreciated, actually, as my hearing seems not to be quite what it was.) But I don’t think that’s the main reason.
Is it that we don’t speak to the concerns of youth? We’re probably a bit less uninhibited in our approach to sexual and lavatorial humour, because we saw the age of so-called alternative comedy through world-weary eyes, and thought its desire to shock was an excuse for the tameness of its political content. But our concerns are often those of youth.
I think much of the blame lies with Masters degrees in playwriting. Far more often than not emerging young playwrights come out of these, most often from the pioneering MRes course started in Birmingham by David Edgar. This is hardly surprising. The qualification is reassuring to a theatre taking a risk on an untried writer, and the teachers are well plugged into theatre management.
When I started work on plays, nearly two decades ago, I thought of doing the Birmingham course, but I had small children then. There were the fees, and they insisted you did it full time. It would have meant hardly seeing the children, and an unacceptable strain on their mother. I did evening classes at the City Lit instead, run by that splendid playwright Steve Gooch. Very good they were too, but nothing like as well connected.
In other creative fields these courses have not established the same sort of stranglehold. When I talk about writing novels, no publisher instantly wants to send me off to the University of East Anglia.
It’s at least arguable that these MA and MRes courses have established a stranglehold over the craft of playwriting; and that this will, in the long run, damage not just the variety of writers, but the variety of the writing.