A chara, – Peter Crawley states (Irish Theatre Awards, February 27th) that "this year's winner of the Irish Theatre Award for Best Production could never have been eligible for the best new play award" because "like last year's winner, Pan Pan's Playing the Dane, or the previous winner, The Stomach Box's No Worst There is None, it had no written text".
As the director/co-creator of No Worst There is None(Best Production 2009) I can attest to the fact that, in the case of that production, this is simply not correct. The performance indeed originated and worked from a written text – a complex collage of stage directions, notes for actors, aesthetic guidelines, descriptions of visual images and materials, technical and lighting details, photographs and architectural plans, alongside poetry, diary, journal entries and letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and written music by composer Seán Mac Erlaine. Much like other forms of written play texts this was revised and augmented in rehearsals creating a new text- verbal, visual and musical.
It is time for the Irish theatre establishment to finally grasp the fact that traditional playwrights are not the only ones writing plays and to revise its very limited criteria accordingly. – Is mise,