The phrase “emerging playwright” should not be restricted to those under the age of 40, leading UK theatre figures have said, as it risks excluding new talent outside generation z.
The novelist and playwright Nell Leyshon told the Guardian that “ageism” was standing in the way of progress for writers who come to the world of theatre in later life.
Leyshon said: “People can have groundbreaking ideas as they get older – look at Caryl Churchill. It’s ageism, and the preconceived idea that once you have grey hairs everyone ossifies.”
Other playwrights, including Anna Jordan and Rona Munro, have added their voices to the growing number of theatre figures calling for more to be done to bring through older writers.
Munro told The Stage that more mature playwrights could offer perspectives “considerably more radical and challenging than those often currently on offer”, while Jordan started a social media questionnaire asking writers for their input on the matter.
Respondents said they worried that they would not be welcomed at new writing schemes and that newcomers over 40 were considered “obsolete” by some in the industry.
Leyshon, who is best known for her novel The Colour of Milk, said that those who take up writing later in life no longer have the support she did when she began writing plays as a 40-year-old with a previous career as a TV commercial producer.
“When I first started there were a lot of literary managers who were looking for new voices; somewhere like Hampstead Theatre had a whole infrastructure and now they don’t have an artistic director,” she said.
“The result of that is that there are so few opportunities. It’s really tough now, so let’s make it nominally tough for all the writers rather than super-tough for the older writers.”
Leyshon said those from marginalised or underrepresented groups would not have to miss out as a result of the inclusion of older writers, and that that by opening up to them theatres could address the lack of diversity in the sector.
“If your voice hasn’t been represented and you haven’t seen your voice out there for whatever reason, you could be a lot older by the time you come to it,” she said. “So all the underrepresented voices are not going to be under 30.”
There have been recent efforts to make space for older writers. Manchester’s Box of Tricks launched a project called Accelerate, a nine-month development programme for northern writers over 35, culminating in work-in-progress performances at Home.
Hannah Tyrrell-Pinder, co-artistic director of Box of Tricks, said it had been created to address the “strange middle ground” that older writers found themselves in “where you’ve been doing it for a bit but now you’re too old for the young playwrights’ schemes”.
The Royal Society of Literature’s Christopher Bland prize has been awarded since 2018 to a first novel or work of nonfiction published when the winner is 50 or older.
This year it went to Chidi Ebere for Now I Am Here and is rooted in the idea that the best writing can emerge later in life, just as it did for the likes of Daniel Defoe and Raymond Chandler.
Leyshon thinks theatre and literature could be missing out on new “radical” work by ignoring older newcomers. “There’s no reason that someone can’t be a really radical writer when they get older,” she says. “There’s this idea that we stagnate as we get older and I just don’t think that is true.”