I wrote my first play when I was 16, starting putting them on about 19, and somehow managed to start making a living from it at 24. Brilliant Adventures is my first ‘major’ production, or however you want to say it.

This means that every now and then I look up and see six actors, a director, an assistant director, a stage manager, and, depending what day it is, another three or four people milling about, and wonder how on earth I got to this point from when I first wrote the play, a process that involved me sitting on my own in the middle of the night, often only in my pants, trying to wrestle the idea out of my head and onto the page.

I finished the first draft of Adventures in September 2010. It’s a bit of an odd play, a mix of social drama and science fiction, and for some reason it feels like a Western as well. It’s set in a town 20 minutes down the road from where I grew up, so feels hugely personal, and when I finished it it felt like the closest I’d gotten at that point to what I want theatre to be – an experience made essential and exciting by the ‘liveness’ of it. I want to make sure anyone coming to see the play doesn’t feel like they could’ve just watched the same story on telly.

Anyway.

Once I’d finished it, I sent it out, and it was then promptly rejected by a whole host of wonderful theatres. Everyone seemed to like it, and everyone wanted to meet up and talk about it, and they said all kinds of lovely things and sometimes even bought me a lunch. But no one seemed to quite fancy doing it. Eventually, it was awarded a Bruntwood prize in 2011, which was a massive honour, and an incredible stroke of luck and good timing, as I was totally skint at the time. Looking at some of the writers who’ve won it in the past (Duncan Macmillan, Andrew Sheridan), it was a real joy for me to be a part of that family, and my emails suddenly started getting replied to a bit quicker. But even before that, the play had become my ‘calling-card script’ which means it was sent all over the place and ended up getting my foot in the door for various other bits and bobs.

One of the biggest things it got me was an attachment at the Royal Court, where I was given a little room and a wage, and set about writing a fairly terrible play. Hats off to the Court, they didn’t banish me, and instead invited me to be part of their ‘Supergroup’ of writers, and programmed Brilliant Adventures to be part of the Young Writers Festival in early 2012, as a rehearsed reading.

The reading was directed by Caroline Steinbeis, who would end up directing the full production because she is incredibly brilliant and ‘got’ the play immediately. It was great to be able to carry the same relationship with the director from the reading over to the full production, having become friends in the process. This means we now have a highly effective shorthand where I’ll only have to kick over about two tables for her to know I’m not happy with something.

Now we’re just starting week four of rehearsals for the show, and it seems like a long time ago I was sat in my undercrackers at one in the morning wondering if a comma was misplaced or not.

I feel immensely lucky to be in this position, staging a strange play with a strange title in two major theatres in two cities I love. I feel hugely attached to this script not just for its content, but because it’s been a companion for three years, taking me to all kinds of places and introducing me to all kinds of brilliant people who are now friends and colleagues. It opened doors to relationships with buildings like the Royal Court, where I’m fortunate to be working again this summer as part of their ‘Open Court’ summer rep season.

I hope the audiences respond to it – when you spend so long having meetings and talking about a play in an academic way, it can be very easy to forget that the ultimate aim is to put on a show for a group of people who’ve paid for a ticket, given up their evening, and are really hoping it’s not shit.

I hope they like it.

Brilliant Adventures runs in The Studio at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre from Wednesday 8 May to Saturday 25 May. It then transfers to Live Theatre, Newcastle from Thursday 30 May to Saturday 15 June.

This morning, the Royal Court Theatre announced Open Court, its summer festival (10 June – 20 July) of plays, ideas and events chosen and suggested by a group of over 140 writers.

As well as being the first project of its kind for the Royal Court, it is also the first programme to be led by the theatre’s newly-appointed Artistic Director Vicky Featherstone, who took over from Dominic Cooke earlier this month and whose first full season of plays starts in September 2013. Featherstone began this morning’s press briefing with a few words about her artistic vision, not just – as she was keen to stress – for the landmark building on Sloane Square, but for the community of writers that makes the Royal Court what it is. She said: “the new vision for the Royal Court is that the writers are going to lead the way – so nothing ‘s changing.”

But if the principles are long-standing, Featherstone – with her self-professed dislike of routine – will be doing all she can to keep them fresh. As her vision for Open Court unfurled, the sheer scale of the project became apparent; half as much would have been impressive. It includes Caryl Churchill’s suggestion of a weekly rep of six new plays in the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs in six weeks, with one company; Surprise Theatre (a hugely exciting sounding project about which not much could be said!) in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs; and Playwright @ Your Table – a suggestion from the Royal Court Writers Tutor Leo Butler which will see playwrights such as Moira Buffini, Caryl Churchill, Simon Stephens, Roy Williams and many more, read their own plays aloud, to small audiences of five or six people in secret locations around the building.

That there were so many writers gathered at this morning’s press briefing is a testimony to Featherstone’s commitment to placing writers at the heart of the theatre’s programming. David Edridge, whose career has so far spanned three artistic directorships at the Royal Court, spoke about writers growing most when they get “outside the garret and think of theatre in a holistic way”, for instance by painting the set or making the tea. This collaborative spirit is what Open Court is all about.

Next up was Anthony Neilson, who will be working with six writers over the festival to explore collaboration through his unique devising style. He spoke elegantly about what he sees as the need for theatre to adapt: “The world is changing and I don’t think that theatre is changing fast enough to keep up with it […] It seems to me that new writers are being rewarded for writing like old writers.”

Other projects include a theatrical treasure hunt with headphones, a soap opera written by Royal Court playwrights (to be  performed in nightly five-minute episodes at the Bussey Building in Peckham) and The Big Idea – Friday night events exploring the big themes of sex, age and death through plays and talks. There’ll also be a series of events and verbatim reports, called The Big Idea: PIIGS, which will focus on those countries in the EU hit hardest by austerity (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain). Plus, a writers’ group for the over 80s and a week of plays, workshops and special events curated by young playwrights aged 8-11.

As she hands over the keys of the Royal Court to its writers for this six-week festival, Featherstone explains that she hopes the events will be taken “in the spirit in which they are meant, which is playful, serious, open, honest and ambitious.”

There’s certainly no questioning the ambitiousness of Open Court. “It’s a huge unknown,” says Featherstone, “That’s why I’m calling it a summer fling.”

In this new blog series, David Byrne, Artistic Director of the New Diorama Theatre, will explore the process of writing and staging a musical, looking at the place of musical theatre in Britain today…

This April, here at New Diorama Theatre, we will stage our first musical. The Universal Machine will be a new musical about the life and death of Alan Turing. And I really didn’t want it to be a musical. I fought against it for quite some time but it was the only way to go and, as soon as I gave in, it felt right. The most recurring question or reaction I’ve had to the piece is why have we turned such a potentially tragic story into a piece of musical theatre?

There is a prevailing assumption that all musicals are staged with lines of kicking girls, jazz hands and camp choreography. Personally, I’ve never seen a musical like this. I’m not sure they really exist outside pastiches in The Simpsons. Most musicals, especially popular ones of the past 20 years, are centered around obscure subjects and issues that you wouldn’t initially dream of setting to music – just look at the Lloyd-Webber back catalogue: the life story of the wife of an Argentinean dictator, obscure parts of the Old Testament and, soon we’re told, the Profumo affair.

The truth is we’ve made Alan’s story into a musical for one main reason: the content fitted the form. I wanted to show the world of a man who can make the most incredible, genius intellectual jumps but had problems connecting to those around him. Showing the people in Alan’s life moving with erudite ease, able to express themselves and their emotions with effortless clarity seems to fit the idea of a completely choreographed piece. Here, through a musical language, characters can communicate freely and try to connect through music, which is always hardwired into us emotionally.

That is the basis on which we’re going forward.

The smaller reason was I’ve been dying to programme some musical theatre at New Diorama. One of the recurring themes I’ve noticed in my professional career has been the complaint that there aren’t enough new musicals. Barely six months goes by without somebody writing an article or starting a debate to ask why in the UK there are so few new pieces of musical theatre attempted while our cousins State-side, seem to churn them out to a more consistent high standard quite regularly.

I’ve always been a huge fan of musicals. Early in my career this was scoffed at by my superiors but, landing a venue of my own to run and programme, I was determined to make musical theatre part of the mosaic of work we present. Also, Jemima, our General Manager had championed new musical theatre while she worked at Arts Council England and fought for companies such as Perfect Pitch to get public funding for the first time. We felt like the right team to do it.

I started off at the big festivals (mainly Edinburgh) trying to find really strong new British musicals. I then moved to looking across the London Fringe, attending showcases and new productions. What I found was a surprising lack of variety and innovation, especially when compared to developments in other dramatic forms, with nowhere near the same number to choose from. I’ve been wondering why that might be the case.

My theory is that all the best writing programmes in the UK that playwrights gravitate towards encourage “straight” theatre – after all, few new musicals are staged at The Bush, the Royal Court, Hampstead etc. I think there’s also an historical issue: for some reason writing musicals is barely a respectable career in the UK. In America, the musical is a respected art-form but here it’s seen as an embarrassing cousin to ‘serious theatre’. At university I wrote my first musical and it was a great success – we won several prizes and a good time was had by all. After it all died down one of my lecturers took me to one side: “Stop with this musical theatre business”, he advised. “Why not try working on some European translations next, maybe move to Paris, live in a squat and date a whore. That’s the respectable way to do it.” He added, with a glint in his eye, “after all, it worked for me”.

Photos: The cast of The Universal Machine in rehearsals. By Richard Lakos for A Younger Theatre.

“It’s funny how plays change their meaning night by night,” says Mark Ravenhill on his adaptation of Brecht’s Life of Galileo. “For the next few nights the audience are going to see it as about a change in Pope.” We’re in the Swan Bar of Stratford-Upon-Avon’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre before the press night of Galileo, Ravenhill’s first production for the RSC as writer-in-residence. Best known for his plays Shopping and Fucking, Mother Clap’s Molly House and the recent cycle Shoot/ Get Treasure/ Repeat, Ravenhill’s residency has been heralded by many as a “shot in the arm” for new writing at the company. He’s also often said to be friendly and engaging in person, and I’m pleased to find this is true: sitting beside me on the sofa, he’s immediately open and charming, complimenting my trousers as I flap around anxiously with notes and dictaphone before we start. In Life of Galileo, Ravenhill says, “one pope is dying, a new Pope’s arriving, and Galileo has great hopes of the new Pope being more liberal and understanding of science,” but the play’s interrogation of the relationship between technology, religion and the state carries a contemporary significance beyond this obvious parallel: Galileo “gives you the real visceral excitement of scientific discovery…  It’s absolutely a pro-science play, but one with a sting in the tail: if we don’t all share in the profits of science, literally money profits, but also intellectual, ethical profits, then it can harm us.”

Life of Galileo dramatises the physicist’s research into a new model of the universe that puts the sun at its centre, opposing the geocentric dogma of the Catholic Church. “Most drama that deals with science is basically anti-science; science is out to get us, or the thing that takes us away from ourselves,” Ravenhill suggests, adding that the marriage of science and art is as present in the play’s form as its content: “Brecht could see a really clear line between the method of the scientist and the method of the dramatist”, he says, citing the playwright’s emphasis on “learning to think methodically, to observe, to break someone down into a series of tasks and checking results, always questioning.” In fact, “Brecht was really a great realist – we tend to think of [Brecht’s theatre] as some kind of attack on naturalism, which is true, but actually it’s not at all about artifice, theatre as theatre, its theatre that’s trying to find any way to get reality onto the stage.”

Given his distinctive writing style, I wonder whether audiences will recognise a Ravenhill resonance in this new version – “I’ve tried as much as I can to capture what I think is the voice of the play and of Brecht’s writing,” he answers. Aware, perhaps, that he is most often associated with his first play Shopping and Fucking, Ravenhill speculates that “the crude image of me is that somehow I’d up the number of swearwords and –” anal knifing, I pitch in, and instantly regret it “– Galileo plus swearwords and anal knifing, yeah. So there certainly isn’t that. Maybe people who have a different knowledge of my work might recognise something.” I’ve heard that he tends to take a practical and experimental approach to playwriting – pool (no water), for example, was developed alongside its cast in collaboration with Frantic Assembly directors Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett – did Life of Galileo evolve in rehearsal? “Not too much,” he replies. In adapting the work, “I had the German text and I had an English academic translation, so I just read the German aloud to get the sound and feel of it on the tongue – basically it was just me alone in a room acting it out.” As for whether this differs to his usual process, Ravenhill laughs: “every play has been totally different – I can’t say I’ve managed to boil it down to anything as dignified as a ‘process’.” It may come as some assurance to aspiring writers that his approach has been “totally different every time, from more or less having nothing but a pile of scraps on the first day of rehearsal, to writing half-drafts on the hoof as we go, to even a couple of times arriving in rehearsal with pretty much the play that’s the one that’s performed.”

Since this interview, Ravenhill’s residency at the RSC has been extended for a further year, and when I meet him it’s clear that he is proud to be involved with the institution. In fact, Ravenhill considers that the RSC owes much of its ethos and aesthetic to the influence of Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble: in terms of design, “that very sort of real fabric, real wood and real metal and real sackcloth” and in performance, its concentration on being “about an ensemble of actors” rather than producing star vehicles. When I suggest that the company has become somewhat safer since its foundation, Ravenhill insists “it’s much more a case of gradually evolving at the RSC – of course there are going to be periods where it sits back a bit and acts a bit steady, and investigates and asks again, ‘why are we doing Shakespeare? How are we doing Shakespeare?’” and points out the ways in which it rebelled against the original Stratford season, which was “very much built around stars”; as he puts it, “you can’t exactly recapture that big turn”.

Ravenhill believes “the track record of new writing at the RSC is really good. Obviously it’s not all year round and it’s not in London, so it doesn’t have the profile of stuff at the Royal Court, but new writing’s always been a part of what the RSC does”. When I ask whether he hopes his residency will pave the way for more and better new writing at Stratford, it’s obvious he’s been expecting the question. “Who knows?” he asks, clarifying “I don’t have any particular axe to grind about them doing more new writing. I think they are the RSC, the main thing they should focus on is doing Shakespeare really well,” although  “one of the things about doing Shakespeare really well is to expose actors and audiences to new plays, which keep on questioning why Shakespeare wrote, and how Shakespeare works.” Ultimately, he reflects that the RSC strikes a successful balance: “it’s much healthier to have the two sitting side by side”.

He’s troubled, however, about what the next few years may hold for theatres generally in the wake of cuts to arts funding. “I think the level at which whole cities are going to absolutely lose all of their arts is something we didn’t really contemplate even five years ago,” Ravenhill ponders, though he’s optimistic that writers will fare comparatively well in this harsh climate: whereas “if you want to direct or act, you have to have somebody give you permission and the resources,” he reasons, “the great thing about writing is that you can just write. If you really want to write a play, there isn’t anybody stopping you… and then if you write a really good play, somebody will put it on.”

With the buzz of the ten-minute call blaring across the bar, I swiftly ask Mark Ravenhill a final question: If money’s not such an issue then, what is the biggest risk to new writing? He pauses for a second. “The biggest risk to new writing is writers not feeling confident enough to explore their own voice. The biggest risk to new writing,” he repeats, “is writers waiting for some sort of permission from an artistic director or literary manager to find out what they should be writing.” This tendency of playwriting to please, he stresses, is particularly prevalent in “the generation brought up on the national curriculum, and SATs and stuff. This generation that’s used to saying, ‘what are the rules? What are the aims and objectives? How do I fulfil the aims and objectives?’ …There’s a danger that these people arrive at a theatre and say ‘tell me what you want from a play – what are the aims and objectives of your theatre?’ And then a play is written with that mentality… that’s the deadliest thing.” Watching Ravenhill’s version of Life of Galileo later that night – a satisfyingly fresh take that certainly achieves his intention of “finding an English equivalent that’s equally energetic, light and springy and funny” – I consider this advice. Questioning and breaking the rules, after all, has always produced the most vital and illuminating work; had Galileo listened to the church, we might still believe the sun orbits the earth.

Life of Galileo plays at The Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon until Saturday 30 March. For tickets and more information, visit http://www.rsc.org.uk/whats-on/a-life-of-galileo/.

Image credit: Ian McDiarmid in A Life of Galileo by Tristam Kenton