Where will modern classics come from without a nationwide new-writing strategy?

And then, in the same week as Myers’ letter, the London Royal Court’s new artistic director, David Byrne, announced the appointment of four playwrights as associates who will make up a collective leadership model that will develop the theatre’s artistic programme.

Byrne’s announcement and Medina’s comments are encouraging and essential but, if we want to develop modern theatre classics, the industry is going to need a coherent strategy with maintained support, as Myers rightly observes. Achieving this relies upon mainstream audiences reconnecting with new writing all over the country.

New writing companies such as Paines Plough and HighTide are doing first-class work in harnessing new and local voices regularly at grassroots level and bringing them to the attention of the industry and audiences in many areas of the UK. But, nationally, more new writers must be encouraged to fearlessly write for main stages across the country and theatres must offer an ongoing commitment to present them. 

Blasted, written by 23-year-old Sarah Kane, is one such modern classic. It was ambitiously programmed by former Royal Court artistic director Stephen Daldry as a premiere in its upstairs theatre in 1995. What is often overlooked was Daldry’s decision to then premiere Kane’s follow-up play, Cleansed, in the West End’s Duke of York’s Theatre, which was home to the Royal Court in 1998 while its Sloane Square base underwent refurbishment. This should be seen as one of the boldest programming decisions of all time. Meanwhile, over at the Royal Court’s second temporary West End home, the Ambassador’s Theatre, Daldry programmed Mark Ravenhill’s play Shopping and Fucking (which subsequently toured and transferred to the West End’s Gielgud Theatre). 

These plays shook the establishment, becoming works that defined the 1990s in the same way that main-stage plays by new writers such as John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Stephen Berkoff, Howard Brenton and Caryl Churchill had done in earlier decades. From a main-stage position, they raised issues and challenged audiences, garnering strong media interest and providing powerful, memorable nights out. The artistic directors and producers who staged them were brave but also knew that these new works reiterated the importance of live performance, the debates it generates and, crucially, that regularly programming this kind of work on main stages nationally empowered writers by providing an infrastructure for their work to reach and connect with large and diverse audiences.

Theatre can risk becoming irrelevant when it plays it safe. In the current funding crisis, there is argument over whether this is the time to avoid risks, or to go on an all-out attack. Theatre should challenge, inform, outrage and divide audiences – when deemed necessary to do so – but it is always driven by writers from home and abroad who have something important to say. This is what makes theatre leaders confident in their play choices and in putting them on main stages. The triumphant return of The Cherry Orchard reminds us why bold, risk-taking programming has always been crucial in the discovery of new voices, and why it’s essential to new writing and finding its future classics.