Tam Hinton receives Best New Play Award 2011
Tam Hinton on winning the award:
Well obviously
it's very gratifying. As I was also the only performer in the show, it's my bum
on the line for the whole production, so a little bit of acclaim goes a long
way. As we all know, all performers and all writers are troubled individuals
who spend all night working feverishly at their craft, in between feeding the
noxious addictions and engaging in the clandestine pursuits which fuel their
creative engines. They sleep the daylight hours away, screaming at dreamdemons
and clawing at their own flesh. So all propers from ones peers are seized upon
like a starving man seizes a juicy beetle.
We live in deeply
conservative times, and it can be tough getting through the doors of a theatre.
It does seem that many venues would prefer well-crafted and predictable to
rough and ready flights of wild experimentation. One piece of advice I would
offer radical writers is that if you should ever meet an attractive booker from
a top Manchester theatre who plies you with drinks while telling you how much
he wants to put on something new and fresh; don't put out in an alley that same
evening. An acquaintance of mine tried this in an entirely fictional way and
says the guy never returned his emails.
This of course is
why the work of NWP, Not Part Of and independent collectives like Studio
Salford are so important. When the uber rich are so strong and the rest of us
are so weak, there has to be someone championing the voice of the outsider.
This needn't mean neo-kitchen sink, which can be as creatively conservative as
any episode of Eastenders. For me, it means having the courage to write
and produce work which goes to the cliff edge of the imagination and leaps into
the darkness. Even if it does mean the other kids call you weird and beat you
up.