Hey just looked at a tonne of notifications on my phone. FWIW I think the @WhatsOnStage playwriting prize is totally well intentioned. It’s just naive. We have to value and prize playwriting, and not seem like it’s a hobby, for middle class people who can afford it.

Its important to treat playwriting or any writing for performance as a craft and work. You don’t just bang out a play in a few weeks for a few hundred quid. Even if a draft is physically written quickly it is or ought to be the product of much prior thought and care.

The theatre is in crisis. Our great theatre culture envied all over the world is threatened. Writers who are the life blood of any vital theatre must be appreciated, invested in and valued properly. Our work matters. Let’s not do anything to cheapen playwriting now.

As I said elsewhere “It is living playwrights who will make sense of the post-pandemic world for their audiences, much as our forebears caught us in dramas from the edges of their own changing times. We must sustain, cherish the playwrights to write the new world.”

Read the @TheWritersGuild #COVID19 manifesto https://writersguild.org.uk/leading-playwrights-and-theatres-back-wggb-covid-19-manifesto/">https://writersguild.org.uk/leading-p...