Anyone for Snooker?

Happy New Year, 2012 will be a very busy and exciting year for the Coliseum and I can’t wait to get started. Once Dick Whittington finishes on Saturday 14 January our production team will be moving to the Old Library where they will be based for the next six months preparing our productions which will be presented at The Grange Arts Centre, Lawrence Batley Theatre in Huddersfield and in the open-air at Alexandra Park. The first production of the New Year is Snookered at University Campus Oldham. This is a brand new play by new playwright Ishy Din which we are producing in association with Tamasha Theatre Company (Wuthering Heights).

Ishy Din, writer of Snookered

New writing is the life blood of the theatre industry and it’s extremely important that it is supported and developed; without new plays live theatre would become simply stagnate. There are many different ways new plays get staged. Established playwrights usually have a good relationship with various theatres and either approach the theatres directly to talk about a new idea or a theatre might seek them out to ask them to create something for them. The Coliseum also supports writers by offering small commissions to playwrights so they can work on their ideas. They will develop storylines, characters and some sample scenes which we can work on; hopefully we will then move to a full commission which will result in a new play being stage at the Coliseum. 

Upcoming playwrights work their way up through different writing groups such as WritingLAB here at the Coliseum, North West Playwrights and BBC Writer’s Room. These groups help nurture their talent and are an integral part of the playwriting industry. Ian Kershaw, for example, was a member of our writing group and we nominated him as one of fifty writers to receive a year’s training and mentorship from Royal Court Theatre in London. He is now a regular writer on Shameless and is currently working on Star-Cross’d, a re-working of Romeo and Juliet for our summer production in Alexandra Park.

Ishy Din is another playwright with a long standing relationship with the Coliseum; he came second in the writing competition we ran with Tamasha in 2007. Ishy is a taxi driver and had never written a play before but we discovered he has a brilliant an ear for characters, no doubt developed by listening to people in the back of his cab. Both the Coliseum and Tamasha have been helping him develop his talent by offering him mentorship from more established professional writers - and now Tamasha have commissioned him to write Snookered.

As Ishy says, ‘I used to be a taxi driver and now I’m a playwright who drives a taxi.’ I am really proud of what Ishy has achieved over the last few years and I’m sure Snookered - which goes on national tour after it opens in Oldham – will boost his career even further.

See you at the theatre.

Kevin Shaw
Artistic Director