Royal Court’s Vicky Featherstone: ‘We live off the hopes and dreams of writers’

Do you know what?” laughs Vicky Featherstone. “I tried to write an AI play the other night. And it was awful, like a really bad television treatment: AI can’t write a play, it literally doesn’t know how to do it.”

Featherstone is long-term (and now outgoing) artistic director of London’s Royal Court, the UK’s leading new writing theatre (that is to say a theatre that only stages new work, with almost no revivals of old plays). It’s one of the most high-pressure and scrutinised jobs in UK theatre, second only to running the National Theatre. But one of the few developments in new writing she doesn’t need to worry about is the rise of ChatGPT et al. Sure, the UK’s premiere new writing theatre is exactly where you’d expect to go to see a play about the sundry other debilitating changes artificial intelligence is going to inflict on our lives. But despite the tech-bro hype, it turns out AI absolutely cannot write plays. Result!

Although the building dates back to Victorian times, the Royal Court story as we know it began in 1956 with the foundation of the English Stage Company, which is essentially the organisation Featherstone runs today. With a mission to spotlight new and experimental writers, it revolutionised theatre with its third play, Look Back In Anger by John Osborne: his realist depiction of an embittered young working-class man essentially changed the course of stage history, breaking the dominance of posh establishmentarians like Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan, paving the way for everything from punk rock to EastEnders.

The problem with being at the sharp edge of change is that you end up pissing people off. The Royal Court has pissed off an enormous number of people over the decades, from its running battles with the Lord Chamberlain in the Sixties, to Featherstone’s predecessor Dominic Cooke’s over-interpreted remarks about how he wanted to put on more plays by middle-class people.

Quick-witted but serene, with a propensity to combine diplomatic language with a little mischief, 56-year-old Featherstone has been the calm at the centre of the Court ever since she took the job in 2012. She has still pissed a lot of people off, most recently the playwright David Eldridge, who wrote an opinion piece for The Observer last month that criticised the way playwrights are treated by artistic directors in this country, citing inaccessibility, timidity and out and out ghosting. Although he didn’t quite accuse Featherstone directly, he did end by basically saying it was a good thing that she was stepping down soon, so, er, draw your own conclusions.

“The thing everybody at the Royal Court feels is the weight of not giving artists good news,” says Featherstone in a measured response. “Obviously it’s not as hard as it is for the writers. But literary managers have left because all they were doing was saying no and they couldn’t really handle that. We live off the hopes and dreams of writers and their optimism and it is a failure on us that writers feel like that.”

However, she demurs from the suggestion that the system could ever be reformed to the total satisfaction of playwrights, or that her theatre – which stages almost wall-to-wall world premieres across its two stages throughout the year – should be programming differently. “The Royal Court has always existed to find who the writers of tomorrow are. Sometimes the writers of tomorrow do get on today. But what it has to do is keep moving forwards.”

Moving is exactly what she’s doing: after a decade at the Court, and almost 30 running new writing companies – before this she was at the National Theatre of Scotland and before that the Paines Plough touring company – she can agree with Eldridge that it’s time for her to step down. “As a director you feel radical: I have so much to say, it’s so important. And then you realise there are other people who need to take that space. It’s really hard!”

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She’s programmed the theatre up until the end of the current financial year, but will be gone long before that – January at the latest – with the announcement of a successor imminent.

Before that, though, she has one last play to direct: Cuckoo. Although new talent is intrinsic to the Court, Cuckoo’s author Michael Wynne is a veteran playwright in his fifties who has had work staged under all four of her predecessors. He’d drifted off into screen work, but after contributing to the theatre’s pandemic-era project Living Newspaper, Wynne sent in his new play and Featherstone pounced on it.

Concerning a family of Liverpudlian women grappling with existential dread in an increasingly automated world, it’s what Featherstone calls a “quiet, fierce play” about white working-class people – a rarity at the Court these days. She suggests that traditional working-class dramas have fallen out of fashion thanks to playwrights becoming wary of the subject due to the rise of poverty porn-style TV. “A lot of younger members of staff haven’t really seen those plays,” she says. Not that she’s been opposed to them: as she constantly reminds me, the Court is led by what the playwrights submit.

Even last year’s Jews. In Their Own Words was already in development when it was fast-tracked in response to one of the Court’s periodic controversies. A satirical play called Rare Earth Mettle by Al Smith caused an upset at the end of 2021 when it became known that its unscrupulous billionaire protagonist had been given the parodically Jewish name of Herschel Fink. The failure of the Court to spot this obvious antisemitic trope unleashed a huge backlash, though on the whole it was directed at the institution more than Featherstone herself. Part of the reason for this was that the theatre has history. In 1987, it very nearly staged a Ken Loach-directed drama called Perdition, which presented an inflammatory and ahistorical account of collaboration between Zionist leaders and Nazis during the Second World War. Twenty-two years later, Caryl Churchill’s short play Seven Jewish Children appeared to deliberately use the word “Jewish” as synonymous with “Israeli” in a furious response to the Gaza War of 2008-9.

Well aware of this, Featherstone was already developing a play about antisemitism on the British left with the Jewish actor Tracy-Ann Oberman. It was handed over to the journalist Jonathan Freedland last year, who quickly assembled a verbatim drama about antisemitism. Did it achieve its aims as a form of theatrical apology?

“I think we did an extraordinary thing,” she says, “insofar as we did the thing that was the most terrifying to do and that’s always really good. And as an institution it felt like we did real genuine learning in order to get that play on. So in that respect, I feel it was really positive. And it brought in a whole audience that doesn’t normally come to the theatre and it did engage in a debate that really needed to happen.”

Underlining what a nightmare running this place can be, Jews. In Their Own Words prompted Cooke and totemic Court playwright Churchill to write a letter to The Guardian decrying Freedland’s play as “outrageous” for its criticism of Seven Jewish Children. Featherstone will not be drawn on whether there’s a serious rift there (she has staged many of Churchill’s plays). But she does acknowledge that balancing the past of the building with its present has been a tricky process: “It brought up the question of how does the Royal Court respect whatever has happened in the past while being allowed to say something in opposition to it.”

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This is all getting a bit heavy, and understandably so. But on a lighter note, I did want to ask her about an outlandish theatreland rumour I’d heard: does she really live in the house from the cult Simon Pegg sitcom Spaced?

She laughs. “I do! I live in the Spaced house.” The full story is even more random. Featherstone and her family – screenwriter husband Danny Brown and their two kids – were after a large north London house they could share with her recently widowed mother, and were amused for very specific reasons that the Tufnell Park property had come on the market: “My husband’s best friend is Nick Frost [who played the hapless Mike in Spaced] and so we went to look at it as a kind of joke. But it was absolutely perfect for us to live in. There are always fans of the show outside taking photos, and sometimes Nick comes round. I don’t know what they think!”

As her successor will no doubt find out, running the Royal Court is not just a case of programming some plays and waiting for the praise to roll in. But for the most part, Featherstone has coped admirably with a job in which heavy criticism is basically baked in. She’s kept her stages busy and fresh over a tough decade that’s been marked – as much as anything else – by a decline in Arts Council funding for the Court. Her willingness to actually respond to criticism, accept she’s wrong and publicly change her mind feels like a rare quality in British public life. And while there are those who have compared her rate of West End hits unfavourably to Cooke, she sees this as unfair: her Court operates in a different ecology to his, with Rupert Goold’s Almeida Theatre, in particular, having occupied a lot of the commercial ground in terms. And there have been transfer hits: Jack Thorne’s Let The Right One In, Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman, Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen, this year’s For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy by Ryan Calais Cameron. Plus there has been no shortage of new writing classics, from Churchill’s cryptic late masterpiece Escaped Alone, to Alice Birch’s devastating Anatomy of a Suicide and Alistair McDowall’s mindbending sci-fi X.

As she prepares to exit stage left to an undecided future – she wants to carry on directing, but she doesn’t want to run a fourth theatre company – I ask her the inevitable question: what advice would she give to help her successor?

“Programme every writer that writes a play,” she immediately fires back, the words of a woman getting close to demob happiness after 30 years of carefully stewarding people’s dreams. Then the diplomat takes over: “was that funny or was that mean?”

A little of each probably, but I do give her the opportunity to give an earnest answer, which she ponders even as an assistant tries to forcibly wrench her back to the Cuckoo rehearsal room.

“A genuine piece of advice would be: don’t be fearful.”

‘Cuckoo’ is at the Royal Court until 19 August