Guest Blog: Playwright Gillian Greer On MEAT at Theatre503

I wrote my first play over ten years ago. That feels like a very personal, almost embarrassing admission from a writer getting her first full-length play to the stage: I've been doing this for ten bloody years.

There are plays of mine, of varying shapes and sizes, gathering dust in the inboxes of every literary department, fringe festival, agency, playwriting competition and scratch night in town (please, those of you who hold those precious PDFs... keep them to yourselves). In an industry that loves a good prodigy, a shiny debut from a young person whose first attempt was liquid gold, I am anything but.

I was asked to write about how my experience as a literary manager, programmer and script reader allowed me to 'cross over' into playwriting, but the reality is much the opposite - I, like many administrators, artist development executives and dramaturgs, am a wolf in sheep's clothing, an artist who found work supporting other artists more quickly than I found the stage myself.

The other stuff was originally all just fodder for my writing. Script reading meant relationships with theatres and access to an endless stream of plays. Plays written by my peers with all the worries, concerns, inspirations and mistakes I was making myself in my own work. Working as a theatre critic for Exeunt Magazine meant free tickets to theatres all over the city. They both also meant accountability - I had to record my thoughts and feelings on work as I consumed it and track the development of my critical voice.

Programming the theatre strand of a project like VAULT Festival and developing work with Clean Break allowed me to connect with other artists with voices absolutely nothing like mine. Where writing was a pretty lonely gig, artist development could do so much more to lift up important stories and make fresh and exciting new voices heard. It became as essential to my work as the writing itself.

Juggling playwriting with artist development has its challenges and complexities, but it's an incredible honour to get to make work while also surrounding yourself with other people's stories. There is no better insight into a craft than watching other people feel their way through it. There is a humbling amount of vision, originality and talent on offer out there, and such frustratingly limited resources to support it.

Seeing the process of developing new plays from both sides gives you patience and empathy for both the commissioners and the artists; it gives you a context that inoculates you from bitterness - at least to some extent - and it forces you to find your own voice. You spend all day reading other people's, so you have no choice but to be unapologetically yourself when you finally sit down to write.

A steady stream of unsolicited scripts from budding writers also gives you an incredible insight into the zeitgeist: what urgent perspectives and stories crop up time and time again.

In 2017, it was political dystopias - plays where women were property or new borders had been drawn or dancing was banned. In 2020, these plays have morphed into climate change stories - worlds where water has run out or all the birds are dead.

Most strikingly for me, in 2018, reeling from the breaking of the Harvey Weinstein story and the force of the #MeToo movement, one-woman shows about rape and sexual abuse - almost all of them autobiographical - were everywhere. Inescapable, almost, sometimes to the detriment of both artist and audience.

My struggles with this, of the intersection of trauma and art and financial success, are a knot I've struggled to untangle in my day job, and it sits at the core of what I'm writing about in MEAT. It's a story inspired, supported and informed by every writer brave enough to share their story with me.

I wrote my first play over ten years ago. In the meantime, I've been a script reader, theatre critic, festival programmer, creative associate and literary manager. It's taken a bit of time for things to come full circle, but I've learned so much from the artists I've worked with over the past few years. I honestly wouldn't have it any other way.

MEAT at Theatre503 until 14 March

Photo credit: Alex Brenner