The Context of Creativity: Creating New Drama and Film about East German Theatre Censorship

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The University of Edinburgh will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall by commissioning the award-winning playwright Peter Arnott to write a play about East German theatre censorship, based on Laura Bradley's AHRC-funded research. This year-long project has been developed in partnership with the Playwrights' Studio, Scotland, and it is designed to enhance understanding of how the East German dictatorship functioned and eventually crumbled, and to stimulate debate and reflection on censorship and the political potential of theatre. The project will be launched with a live performance event in November 2014, followed by a monthly blog by Peter Arnott, a script development workshop, a public reading of the draft script, and a tour of rehearsed readings of the finished play. The filmmaker Susan Kemp will make a 70-minute documentary film that will follow Arnott's creative journey as he engages with the research and develops his play with actors and an audience. The film will thus allow Arnott and the Playwrights' Studio to reflect on the situation of playwrights in Scotland today, compared to the GDR. It will simultaneously open up the subject of East German theatre censorship and the work of Arnott and the Playwrights' Studio to a wider audience, including theatre practitioners in Germany and the UK who may be interested in staging the play. The project will culminate in a day-long showcase event at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2015, featuring a reading of the play, a screening of the film, and a roundtable debate on censorship. The participants will include international theatre practitioners and critics, who will use the East German play to start an international conversation about experiences of censorship today. The film will be entered at festivals and submitted to the commissioning editor at BBC Four, and further screenings will be arranged in Scotland and Berlin.