A symposium hosted by New Perspectives Theatre Company, supported by the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain

For fifty years, New Perspectives has been championing new writing, shaping the careers of playwrights, nurturing artists, and amplifying regional voices.

Our story is captured in a unique archive at the University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections, spanning fifty years of artistic programming, featuring unpublished scripts, scores, company evolution, funder relationships and audience engagement, across a time of substantial economic, demographic, and social change.

Drawing from this rich archive we will discuss how changes in the company and its artistic productions reflect changes in the communities we serve over time, to find out what we might learn from the company's past, to inform the role touring theatre has in the future of new writing in the UK.    

A conversation about the future, informed by fifty years of innovation, connection, and artistic experiment, for theatre workers, academics, audience members, policy-makers and curious minds took place at Nottingham Playhouse on Tuesday 11 March.

PANELISTS INCLUDED:

Dr Tony Coult, playwright and Unfinished Histories contributor 

Dr Susan Croft, Director Unfinished Histories

Simon Deacon, Professor of Music, Goldsmith's, University of London 

Mary Elliot Nelson, actor, writer and dramaturg

Angharad Jones, Artistic Director/CEO New Perspectives 

Mufaro Makubika, playwright

Laura Peaurt, Archivist (digital preservation) University of Nottingham

Richard Pinner, founder member of Perspectives as well as a playwright, and Chair of the Writers Guild Theatre Committee

Professor Jo Robinson, Newcastle University

Jane Upton, playwright

Julie Wilkinson, playwright and academic, ex-member of New Perspectives

and featuring a spoken word poem written and performed by Ravelle-Sadé Fairman