What is it and how did it come about?
 | | The Diversification of Veg Boy |
"It’s a festival of new writing for theatre performed in non-theatre spaces. It came about when I was working at the Edinburgh Festival fringe four years ago. As a lot of people know, theatre is performed everywhere and anywhere in Edinburgh and while I was there I thought: 'there’s a potential here for something in Manchester surely'. We have the writing talent, directing talent and performing talent and not enough places for people to be seen. It took us a year and a half to get the first one up and running but now we’re in our third year. What we do is to invite writers to submit scripts which are then read for us by a team of adjudicators and then the best writing is invited to take part in the festival." So what sort of venues do you use? "We can’t afford to hire theatres. What we’re doing is giving a first time showcase for a lot of this writing. In fact, a lot of the writers are first time writers. The benefit of this festival is that someone who's been toiling away in their bedroom writing a play has the chance for it to be performed in front of an audience and talent scouts. In one case, we actually going to be using the Palace theatre bars. And all the venues are within strolling distance of St Peter’s Square tram station. So Palace Theatre, Midland Hotel, Bedlam café bar and Walkabout Aussie pub. All very nice especially in this weather." How supportive have the venue managers been? | "Some of them are ecstatic – in fact, one or two seem unable to contain their excitement!" | | 24:7 Director David Slack on what it means to new writers |
"The Palace Theatre manager actually got in touch and said: we know you can’t afford the space on the stage, but we’re quite prepared to give you other spaces in the building. The Palace Theatre is a very interesting building because it’s so old and two of our plays are going to be performed underneath in the stalls bar area in what we call promenade performances so the action takes place in several different areas and the audience walk around and follow the action." How are the writers feeling about having their work performed? "Some of them are ecstatic – in fact, one or two seem unable to contain their excitement! It’s not a long process, it’s straight up there with this stuff. What we find is that if you ask a writer, would you like play performed they’ll say: 'Of course!' So every writer of the 17 plays we have in the festival is their own executive producer. And through our expanding network, we’ve managed to get them in touch with a director and some actors so they are the prime mover of the piece. And believe me, it gets done." And you’re holding some workshops...
 | | Trapped (pic: Tom Wright) |
"The workshops are going to be held to help people to get into the theatre arts. So very practical ones from stage combat, learning how to fall, how to apparently punch someone, right through to writing as revenge ie getting all these issues into a piece of theatre which is cathartic for you and educational for your audience." | 
