From Page To Performance

The Rapid Write theatre model – in which a play goes from blank page to the stage in just eight weeks – has its origins in Theatre503, London, and is now coming to Griffin Theatre with the brains behind it all, recently departed artistic director of 503 Tim Roseman, in tow.

The concept is born from a desire not only to speed up the often arduous and drawn out process of staging a play –“Because of the programming cycle in Australia where you announce a year at a time, if you don't hit that at exactly the right point in the cycle then you're potentially waiting,” Roseman says – while also being able to respond to more immediate contemporary stories.

“In a traditional cycle your immediate idea about something really current – 'I'm going to do a play about the global financial crisis!' – by the time it actually lands on the stage you're not watching it with the same immediacy or urgency.  Rapid Write was born in London out of an idea to say, 'Well, we refute the idea that it takes a year to write a play, let's write it really quickly', and there'll be some differences in the finished-ness of the work and the maturity of it, but on the plus side you'll watch it with the active part of your brain and you'll lean into the play rather than sit back and let the play come to you,” Roseman reasons.

The process, however, is not without its traps, and when discussing the issue to be tackled in Griffin's venture into the Rapid Write mode, another satire with an immediate response time comes to mind. When talking about the chosen proposal, CJ Johnson's Hollywood Ending: Or, How A Washed Up Director Made A Crappy Movie That Almost Destroyed The World, Roseman picks his words carefully, treads lightly through a minefield of misinterpretation, and the resulting overview sounds strangely similar to the legal disclosure offered in the opening credits of another peddler of incredibly timely, contemporary satire, South Park.

“Using recent events as a starting point, it's used them to make a fictional account of how a fictional piece of hate speech can be made. So there is a seismic event that happened globally a couple of months ago that had global repercussions, and huge repercussions in Sydney, which was one of the other reasons we were attracted to it, because it had had a big impact on the Sydney community in a way that the Australian community hadn't ever really expected; it was one of those times when Sydney's geography makes us think that we are slightly outside of the global matrix in a good way and suddenly it was knocking on our door,” Roseman says.

The comedy of the production is also at the fore of Roseman's mind though, and well aware of the potential for something remotely political to become rapidly didactic with such a short window to create the work, he stresses that what's offered is more observations than solutions.

“This play doesn't try and understand or give a moral message about the politics of making hate speech and why that piece of bile was made the way it was, it just says, 'Well, who on earth were those people?' All of the characters in the play are entirely fictional and once you get beyond the fact that there was an older guy who had made porn who makes this film, everything else in the play is entirely our imagination and we just used it as a kind of jumping board to be playful and a bit naughty.

“It's not about the controversy, it's about 'How the fuck did this happen?'”

WHAT: Rapid Write: Hollywood Ending
WHEN & WHERE: Wednesday 21 November to Saturday 15 December, SBW Stables Theatre