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New Writing at DunsPlayFest



John McEwen, festval director sits at his desk pondering his writings in his library

DunsPlayFest is many things but above all it is a festival of new drama. With its origins in two, Hawick-based, writing workshops (“Page to Stage” run by Ellie Zeegan and Janet Coulson, and the Playwrights Studio Scotland programme run by Jules Horne), DunsPlayFest began life as a means to get some of the work produced in those workshops on stage and out there. Since that first incarnation in 2019 the festival, still sticking to its format of nine days at the beginning of May, has grown in ambition and scope, added more music, film, poetry, dance and comedy, but has always retained its emphasis on the just-written play. Ultimately, new writing is what we’re about.

In 2024 the line-up included five plays written by stalwarts of our mother company, Duns Players, and although our ambition is limitless with regard to attracting the very best new drama from anywhere in the world, we will never lose our community-theatre element. We believe that theatre is the best way we have to consider together the business of life, and so it is essential that our Duns-based festival includes writing by Duns-based playwrights. It is, of course, thrilling to see the emerging playwrights of Duns rise to the challenge, take their courage in both hands and get their work finished and ready to be presented on stage. It is also gratifying to consider that somewhere like Duns, (little known beyond Berwickshire, with no theatre and a population under 3,000) could hardly be expected to nurture five performable playwrights in one year were it not for DunsPlayFest. And all the plays might have a life beyond the festival.


Performer, Clare Watson stands on a white sheet holding a piece of paper in her hand. She is reading

That has certainly proved to be the case with some of the professional companies bringing work to Duns. All the leading theatre-makers in the Scottish Borders have been represented at the festival and all know that we will be delighted to show-case their work at whatever stage of development it finds itself. Thus, Clare Prenton’s deeply delightful Men Don’t Talk had a rehearsed reading with us in 2022; in 2024 it went on a hugely successful national tour. In 2024 both John Nichol and Firebrand tried out works – El Duglas and A Room of One’s Own respectively – for the first time at Duns. Both shows went on to tour and develop and in 2025 El Duglas will be back in Duns, refined and enhanced and seasoned.



A man stands with a sword in his right hand with a crown on his head and a tabard with a lion on

We love and respect the process, and want to give space to work at every stage of development, from first read-through onwards. It proved particularly interesting, for example, when Jane Houston-Green (well-known Borders actor, director and film-maker) presented her version of the Wilson’s Tale, The Apparition of Flodden, as a performance with theatrical effect and actors seeing the script for the first time. 



Woman in black suit on a chair leaning forward with intensity

As the festival has developed and standards have inevitably risen, we have realized that the main show of the day, usually at 7.30 in the evening, must be properly rehearsed and professionally presented, but earlier and later than that, anything goes.

This means that script-in-hand performances, radio plays, rehearsed readings, student productions, experimental work and work which can only go on “after the watershed”, are scattered around the schedule, normally at either about six o’clock or nine o’clock, either on the main or the cabaret stage or, from 2025 onwards, at our new venue, the wonderful gallery space, No 31 just up the road in Newtown Street.

Speaking of student productions, we have recently formed an alliance with the theatre schools of Edinburgh and are delighted that graduates of Napier, Queen Margaret and Edinburgh College now have us in mind when forming their companies, looking to perform. In linking up with such as Shark Bait, whose play The Rejects was a highlight of DPF ’24, we have been greatly helped by Live Borders who also strive to attract touring companies to the Borders.



A group of five twenty somethings

The great playwright, Rona Munro, who ran a workshop for Berwickshire High School students at the very first DunsPlayFest, always emphasises the necessity for a playwright to re-write. Drama is dynamic, ever-shifting, unpindownable. Blink and you’ve missed it. When the Volunteer Hall, where we are based, is emptied after the festival, the marvellous decoration removed, the staging and all the electrical equipment packed away, it can feel like it was all a dream, the 75 performances, the music and laughter, the conviviality and joy. And, indeed, it was a dream; but it was a dream in which we all shared.

Theatre is like that, fleeting, evanescent – but, at the same time, capable through its magic of transforming an existence, forever. We believe that theatre matters and new theatre - just-forged and ready, quivering, nerve-wracked, brave, alert, urgent, wrestling with reality, beautiful – matters tremendously. Through its presentation of just-written drama, DunsPlayFest (never not ambitious) hopes to change, indeed to save, lives.

 





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