Norwich, UK – March 2, 2024 – Marie Cooper is one of Six East of England playwrights to have been chosen for the prestigious HighTide Writers Group this year.
The 12-month programme run by HighTide and leading playwrights Juliet Gilkes Romero (The Whip, RSC) and Tim Price (Nye, National Theatre) helps playwrights at all career stages develop their craft.
Writers were handpicked for the competitive program based on writing samples and accomplishments. This year’s cohort also includes Great Yarmouth-based playwright and poet Clare Currie, Suffolk writer and performer Ted Marriott, Ipswich playwright Anoop Singh, Norwich writer and producer Rosa Torr, and Essex artist and playwright Esohe Uwadiae.
Over the 12 months, the playwrights receive a £750 bursary, are paired with professional mentors, introduced to theatres, granted R&D time with actors, and have extracts presented at the HighTide Rising, Festival of new plays.
“I’m still a bit in shock that I was chosen, to be honest. I feel so grateful and incredibly excited for this amazinv opportunity to develop my writing with guidance from these exceptional mentors.” said Marie Cooper.
The program was recently featured in The Stage:
The HighTide Writers Group programme is supported by The Foyle Foundation and The Noel Coward Foundation.
A playwright does the editing, writing, rewriting, a little more research, editing and rewriting again. You check your typos. Make sure your program hasn’t changed your dialogue into stage directions – I don’t even know how or why that happens. Then suddenly there seems to be a million and one other things to add, remove, look up. In fact, the edit is likely to never end unless you decide that what’s done is done, put it down and run far, far away. Or maybe that’s just me?
This was the first time I’d taken on this challenge, to write 28 Plays in the 28 days of February. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. It wouldn’t be much of a challenge if it was now, would it?. My brain did, at times, try to resist and procrastinate, to make it easier for me. Which made it more difficult and stressful as the deadlines approached. Stupid brain.
I’m trying to get organised for the month ahead for 28 Plays Later. I’m writing this blog post now because I know what’s coming. Oh, my God! That sounds like something out of a horror novel. My time is short, so I write this to you now. Knowing that soon it will be too late.
I titled this ‘Playwriting Retreat’, but it is more of a self-imposed playwriting lockdown to be precise. I’m not going anywhere. No villa overlooking an olive grove in Italy. No sitting on a balcony overlooking a coastal town in Portugal. Not that I ever do, but one can dream.
