Hello Mark. I hear The Marlowe Theatre has a new studio space, which means you can start producing work as well as receiving it. What sort of new writing are you looking to commission?

First of all, if you’re a young playwright and you want your work produced, you need to start making relationships. We have a wonderful literary associate called Simon Mendes Da Costa; in reality he’s also our writer-in-residence. My advice is: come and talk to him. To us. You can just email us and ask for a chat.

One thing that doesn’t work – and this may sound like heresy – is to send in unsolicited scripts. Most theatres simply don’t have the capacity to deal with them. Even if you’re a fast reader – and I’ve done reading in my time –  you’re going to spend up to two hours reading it, and nine times out of 10 it’s not going to be something you want to produce. 

Part of what’s exciting for you, I imagine, with this new space, is to be able to build an idea with a writer for that venue, rather than getting it fully-formed.

Yes, that’s exactly how it should work these days. You’ve got to start with a conversation. That could be with Simon, or with our head of creative projects Andy Dawson. The whole point of writing plays is to get them produced.

If we had someone who we thought was working hard and had good ideas, we’d tell them to come and see Paines Plough in the studio and see how it’s done.

As a regional theatre you have to put on popular shows to earn an income. But last year you told Jim Davidson he couldn’t perform at the Marlowe because he “can be very racist [and] very homophobic”. How do you balance principles and profit? 

Our subsidy is very low and not going to rise. If anything it’s going to reduce. So what we do is what I call internal subsidy – we have a mixed programme of work in the main house. We’ve got Glynebourne, ballet and a month of plays along with some very commercial offerings like Jersey Boys. Jersey Boys will make a good return for us and we then spend some of that money to help us do the creative and developmental work. If you’re not going to invest in the new and young, you might as well pack up and go home.

You’ve had an entire theatre career without ever really working in London. How? 

I’ve got quite a missionary zeal for regional theatre. You’ve got to decide quite early on in your career if you want to be a London person or a regional person. If you’re going to be a regional person then you need to keep moving around. Don’t stay put in your twenties. Once you get into partners and mortgages, it’s much harder to do that, so do it now. Look around, don’t have prejudices and go to where the next interesting job is.

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Image of Beached courtesy of Marlowe Theatre.