Dear Åpne teater,
Thank you for this weeks guest performance from the Traverse Theatre in Scotland. ("Gagarin Way" by Gregory Burke, 15/16 October). It was an exciting, political, emotional, character driven, world play! I was saddened to be in an audience of between thirty and forty people in an auditorium for over two hundred for such an important drama. As a writer it reminded me, that in order to write such a good play with such international consequences you have to tell the story from a local perspective.

Dear, dear Åpne Teater, You are the most important Theatre in all of Oslo. I love you. And yet as a local writer you seem distant and closed to me. You are always away, doing good work, no doubt, networking and collaborating internationally, but at the cost of producing local work, building a local tradition of new writing.

In your autumn programme you printed why you develop texts exclusively via a workshop process, and therein lies my problem with you. The workshop development programme was an excellent way to found and begin Det Åpne Teater. But is it not now time for phase two?

To my mind we need what the Traverse Theatre has. It produces plays. Since 1963, over 600 plays. That is an average of 15.4 plays produced each and every year.

It is adamant that it only produces local Scottish plays.

After all writing is a local tradition.

Yet no-one is producing plays on an constant accessible basis in Oslo at the moment. There is a famine of new writing.

The workshop process Det Åpne teater offers fails me as a writer, as all it can offer me is helpful constructive criticism. The real truth is with an audience. A production can tell me more in an instant than anyone can. It also offers me a goal. And everyone who writes, knows writing is a goal related business.

The workshop process fails the public, as they cannot participate. And new writing is thus disappearing in their memory as something they do. At this point the public almost doesn't go to the theatre. They certainly won't go to new writing, unless we do something.

The workshop process fails me as a theatre director, because the aim of such a process is an eternal mystery. And I have often observed my fellow directing colleagues pass time in such a process without any aim being realised.

We need productions of plays.

I know Det Åpne has no production budget, but neither did the Travese theatre. Indeed it's programme which I bought at the performance at Dåt this week, talks of 'maverick enthusiasm' which saw it through the seventies and eighties on partial or no financial support.

We need many small scale plays so that the public is again awakened to new writing.

We need plays so that writers again have a forum where there work is reflected, not filed.

We need productions because there is now in Norway a freelance culture of unemployed actors and directors.

We need plays, because you love new writing. Don't you Åpne Teater?

Could not all parties who are interested in producing a season (5 plays?) of new Norwegian writing, an easily recognisable and accessible product to the public, come together at Det Åpne Teater and discuss ways in which we could begin and sustain a local tradition of new writing, which in time will have far reaching international consequences?

The future of new writing is in production.

Stephen Hutton

DEBATT