W
hat is the point of a festi-
val? It’s a question that
preoccupied me when I
took over the National
Student Drama Festival
(NSDF) three years ago.
NSDF has been running since 1956,
encouraging and celebrating the best
of student theatre, sponsored by The
Sunday Times. A festival should be a
place where people from every part of
our society who would never normally
come together meet. Where they make
work and dream futures together. A
tough thing to achieve, because it is not
the case that everyone in this country
has the same access to culture, and it is
also the case that the past few years
have seen us more divided.Starting my job as the world shut
down was a challenge, but the crisis
of Covid gave me cover to be radical. We
produced the first fully online festival
in the UK, just two weeks after the first
lockdown. With new technology we
created new collaborations that
spanned the UK and the world. And
it worked; 10,000 took part in our
first online festival. A 335 per cent
increase in participation. We won a
national award as the “UK’s Digital Trail-
blazers”.
I founded NSDF Creates, making us
for the first time a production company
that made work, rather than solely seek-
ing out shows as we used to.
This year the world has been opening
up again, and we put on our first post-THEATRE
ALL THE
WORLD ON
A STAGE
Covid in-person festival — to carry our
online work into real life. We had 19 new
pieces put on at the Curve Theatre in
Leicester.
As I watched plays about everything
from British history to the dangers of
gossip, by young people from all back-
grounds, from all around the country, itwas clear our experiment had worked.
I knew it when I saw Reservation, a
new show I had co-commissioned with
Nickie Miles-Wildin, the fierce and
brilliant outgoing artistic director of
DadaFest, which works with disabled
and deaf artists. Reservation was made
entirely by disabled, deaf and neuro-The National Student Drama Festival is back
with exciting new plays and a huge crowd. The
future’s bright, says its director, James Phillips
HOW TO WRITE A SCREENPLAY — NINE LESSONS FROM LUCY PREBBLE AND JACK THORNE
It takes perspiration as well as
inspiration to write scripts for theatre,
film and television. Jack Thorne may
be one of our hottest scriptwriters —
behind This Is England and the
theatrical juggernaut Harry Potter
and the Cursed Child — but the first
episode of his TV adaptation of Philip
Pullman’s His Dark Materials took two
years of work and 46 drafts. Lucy
Prebble, best known for co-writing
and producing Succession, wrote
17 drafts of her play Enron.1 Finish your script
Most new writers never complete
their script, so make sure you do,
Prebble advises. “If you finish
something you are already in the top
5 per cent of people who want to be
writers,” she says.2 Don’t give up hope
Forget scouring books for inspiration,
sometimes the best method ofgenerating ideas is to sit in front of a
computer and hope, Thorne says.
“The feeling of, ‘Oh, that’s what it is’
doesn’t happen very often, but when
it does, everything just flows.
Sometimes it happens right at the
beginning, sometimes you just have to
chip away.”3 Start with what you know —
however young you are
Prebble believes that younger writers
know best about what is cutting-edge.
“Early on in your career, you probably
have a better idea of what people
want than producers, who might be
twice your age, and are looking for
something new.”4 Talk to yourself
It might sound like you’re going
crazy, but Prebble says
making voice notes can be
more useful than bashing a
keyboard. “By expressing itmyself and recording it on my phone,
dialogue has a more human feeling. It
feels less written.”5 Be grumpy
For most people, writer’s block is
scary. But Thorne says embrace it —
the five months when he struggled to
write anything of note were thrilling.
“Treasure the feeling of saying that’s
not good enough,” he says. “I don’t like
it and it makes me grumpy and less of
a nice person but it helps me.”6 Celebrate the imperfect
Thorne thinks as he’s got older he has
adopted a writing polish that can be
“dangerous”. “When you know what a
good play looks like, it means that you
can end up where it doesn’t feel as
truthful,” he explains. “Sometimes the
blunt and brutal edges of when you
don’t know how to do something are
useful. Don’t fall into the habit of
writing shows where people can say,
‘I know exactly what the ending is.’”7 Collaborate
Prebble wasn’t sure about taking on a
writing role for Succession until she
entered the writers’ room. “I just
found it so freeing. The bonding,
affection, insights and camaraderie
are so much better for you,” she
says. “Being close to a
showrunner like Jesse
Armstrong makes you
realise how you can write
but also have support.”Write stuff
Lucy Prebble
and Jack Thorne22 24 April 2022