Dubai’s first professional playwrights’ studio will open on Sunday, January 25, with 15 resident writers participating in programmes developed to promote Middle Eastern talent and export regional stories to international theatres.
Alex Broun, an Australian playwright who has been dubbed “the Shakespeare of short plays” and who directed the Short+Sweet 10-minute theatre festival in Dubai in last year, is behind Dubai Playwrights’ Studio. The studio will open at the Dubai International Writers’ Centre on Sunday, January 25, with a 10-week course for experienced and amateur playwrights that will end in a reading of the scripts.
The studio has been set up with support from Advet Bhambhani, the chief executive of Lifeline Healthcare.
“When Advet attended Short+Sweet last year, he expressed a desire to set up more opportunities for writers, actors and directors here in Dubai,” says Broun, who moved to Dubai from Australia to run workshops at the studio. “So we have identified certain areas of theatre that need to be addressed and will be introducing more courses to widen the scene.”
Broun says he wants to change the constant reliance on imported stage productions by creating a network of capable writers in the UAE.
“Most of the works that are staged in Dubai and Abu Dhabi are brought from outside, the UK, US and India,” he says. “What we need to do now is promote people who have a passion and knowledge for theatre and writing and start pushing their work out.”
The course will cover the different facets of playwriting each week. Broun will begin with a run-through of play structure and then tackle character, dialogue, situation, theatricality, dramatic tension and humour during the classes.
“They will also be developing their plays and at the end we will have a showcase, bring in actors for a reading,” says Broun. “It benefits the writer to see actors read their work out loud.”
Broun, whose scripts have been adapted by theatre companies around the world and have been translated into Spanish, Farsi and German, says this is a golden age for high-calibre writers in the Middle East.
“We have identified a real interest in writers from the region,” he says. “A lot of plays at the West End in London or Broadway in New York are based on the works of Middle Eastern writers. It is, after all, one of the most dramatic areas in the world today. So writers from Syria, Libya and Palestine – writers who can tell stories from the region’s perspective – are sought after.”
Broun hopes to encourage those themes and develop plays that can be submitted to international theatres, including the Royal Court Theatre in England and Playwrights Horizons in the United States.
“We want to export writers rather than import them,” he says.
At the same time, the plan is to open up a new genre of fusion theatre that will introduce Arabic stories to an English-speaking audience.
“We want to bring together foreign cultures coming to Dubai and the Emirati and Arab cultures,” says Broun. “We have some Arabic writers who have signed up for the studio and will be developing plays in Arabic and English.
“What we want to do is move towards bilingual productions, like Hinglish [Hindi and English] plays, where half the play will be in Arabic and the other half in English.”
Moving forward, the studio will be introducing stage-acting and screen-acting classes, along with courses for schoolchildren.
• The first 10-week course at Dubai Playwrights’ Studio begins on Sunday, January 25, at the Dubai International Writers’ Centre in Al Shindagha neighbourhood. The course costs Dh1,500 and will run every Sunday from 7pm until March 20. To register, email alex@constellation.ae
aahmed@thenational.ae
