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Articles
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Articles |
The Traverse Takes London by StormDateline: 14th January, 2003If you are a young playwright and want to get produced on a London stage, one of the ways of ensuring that you do so is to appear at the Traverse Theatre during the Edinburgh Festival. As a by-product, there is also a great chance of winning a Fringe First or a Herald Angel Award. The major hit of the 2001 Festival was Gagarin Way by Gregory Burke, which then had considerable commercial success in London. The previous year, Further Than the Furthest Thing by Zinnie Harris moved to the National Theatre and then the Tricycle. By the end of March, six months after the end of the Edinburgh Fringe 2002, just about every UK-based company that appeared at the Traverse in 2002, will have made it onto a London stage. This is a very fine record and fully deserved, as the programmers at the Traverse take so much care to ensure that they have a good selection of the very best theatre in town, each year. Already, two of the major successes, (in the eyes of the writer of this article the two best shows of the Fringe Festival 2002), David Greig's Outlying Islands and Anthony Neilson's Stitching have done well at the Royal Court and the Bush respectively. These were productions were signed up by the London theatres before they even reached the Traverse. During January, each of these theatres is putting another Traverse success into their repertoire. Gary Owen's apocalyptic play The Drowned World, produced by two of our best companies, Paine's Plough and Graeae, is opening at the Bush on 16th January while Rona Munro's prison drama, Iron, which features an outstanding performance by Sandy McDade, reaches the Royal Court's Theatre Downstairs on the 27th. Following these, Safety by Unlimited, a play about voyeuristic photography and war zones is touring the country having been around the world since last August and includes a couple of dates in London in March. The main common factor amongst all of these plays is that they are of very high quality and show a spirit of artistic adventure all too rarely seen in theatres today. This is why the Traverse is beginning to build a reputation as the Fringe theatre that is better than the International Festival. It also means that if you are based in London and want to pick a really good show to go and see during January, you could do far worse than visiting two of the best new writing theatres in London, the Royal Court to see Iron and the Bush to see The Drowned World.
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