The Artiscape spoke to Dutch-British theatre-maker Teunkie Van Der Sluijs, one of three shortlisted winners of the Originals Playwriting Award. The Originals Playwriting Award, launched by Originals Theatre Company, is a competition for early career playwrights. It is judged by a panel of industry experts which will take place from the 31 June – 2 July.
Teunkie Van Der Sluijs was shortlisted for Tikkun Olam. The other shortlisted winners are: Drew Hewitt for The Fall and Eilidh Nurse for Miles. Each of those shortlisted receive £2000, with the winner announced post the performances at Riverside receiving a further £5000.
Launched in collaboration with Riverside Studios, each of the four plays will receive a script-in-hand performance at the venue, directed by established theatre directors, Michael Boyd, Michael Fentiman, Charlotte Peters, and Amelia Sears. It will be filmed and streamed live by North South.
Teunkie Van Der Sluijsis works predominantly as a director in the UK and in Europe. He is Head of Artistic Development at the Young Vic, having been Creative Associate there since 2019. His translations and adaptations have been performed Off-Broadway and in a range of festivals, venues and tours in Britain and the Netherlands. Tikkun Olam is his first play.
How did you feel when you heard you were shortlisted for The Originals Playwriting Award?
Teunkie: Elated, grateful, and most of all surprised: Tikkun Olam is my first play. While I’ve translated and adapted for the stage, writing an original play felt very daunting to me, especially as English isn’t my first language. So, I felt, and still do, very thankful to the Original Theatre Company, the award’s judges, Riverside Studios, and Michael Boyd for wanting to take a chance on a brand new piece of work.
Can you describe for our readers why it is so important to innovate production opportunities for writers such as yourself?
Teunkie: I’m sure it’s different for every writer, but what helped me were the concrete parameters offered by the award: a target script length, cast size, and most of all a deadline. Without such a clear idea of the production circumstances for which to write, I think the play would still only be a set of ideas, character sketches and half-formed lines of dialogue in a file buried somewhere on my hard drive.
What inspired you to become a writer?
Teunkie: I’m not sure I’d call myself a writer (yet); I’m a theatre-maker who’s mostly been focussed on directing for the past decade-and-a-bit. What inspires me in my writing and directing is a desire to make sense of the world around me. Of the structures we’ve built and inherited to organise how we live together as a society. To understand the motivations, drives, and actions that lead people to do extraordinary things, defy odds, or come to better understand themselves. And to make the emotional impact of that felt. It’s very Brechtian: I like to point a magnifying glass at things and go “Is that so? Why is that so? How else can it be?”
What influences/ informs your writing?
Teunkie: Maybe it’s because I was a director and translator/adapter first, so I am used to working with other people’s words, but my main influence are real events and real people on whom I base characters. I guess that makes the blank page a bit less daunting: there’s somewhere concrete to start from.
Even if my imagination then takes that into fictional directions – for emotional effect, or dramatic impact. But the biggest influence on my work as a theatre-maker are my collaborators, especially actors.
Actors are wonderfully generous with their creativity, and the rehearsal room is a special place where they will endlessly share the kind of insights I mentioned earlier: why people do the things they do. Not by analysis, but by embodiment, empathy, and imagination. By play. At the end of a good day in the rehearsal room, you leave feeling you understand more about the human condition than you did in the morning.
What is next for you? Are you working on anything else at the moment that you would like to tell our readers?
Teunkie: The same day the Originals Playwriting Award winners were announced, I took up a new position as Head of Artistic Development at the Young Vic, where I’d been Creative Associate the last three years. In my new role, I look after developing the work we want to programme and produce, especially in its early stages – from sourcing plays and production ideas, to connecting to the exciting creatives of tomorrow, to dramatising new work and re-imagining existing plays.
Now is a very exciting time for the Young Vic: we’re in the middle of planning our programme for 2023/24 and there’s lots of new work that is big in ideas, big in form, and big in what it has to say about the world.
As a director, Teunkie Van Der Sluijsis work includes the trilogy Clybourne Park, Beneatha’s Place and A Raisin in The Sun (International Theatre Amsterdam for Well Made Productions) for which he received the 2017 Amsterdam Award for the Arts. He also directed the Netherlands premières of The Mountaintop (De Meervaart Theatre), Water Dragers (Het Zuidelijk Toneel), Lungs (Compagnie Theatre) and Motor Town (Rozen Theatre). In the UK, he has directed Hate (Barbican – was shortlisted for the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award), Yasser (Assembly Rooms Edinburgh, Arcola London, Chopin Theatre Chicago and Royal Theatre The Hague), Winter (Orange Tree Theatre), and Women Laughing (Old Red Lion, Off West End Award Nomination for Best Director). He was Resident Director for global entertainment company Imagine Nation on Anne: The Diaries of Anne Frank at Theatre Amsterdam, and previously worked at HOME Manchester, as Staff Director at the National Theatre and as Trainee Director at the Orange Tree Theatre.
