I spent all day Saturday at RTE Radio Centre in the company of the other shortlistees in the 2011 PJ O’Connor Awards for Radio Drama. It was great to meet up with the others and exchange ideas about how we do our work. The workshop was organised by the RTE Drama Production team of Aidan Mathews, Kevin Reynolds and Kevin Brew, and the day was facilitated and led by Jesper Bergman, Dramaturge of the Royal Theatre Denmark and permanent judge of the PJ O’Connor Awards.
To be honest I wasn’t really sure what a dramaturge was, but after a day of immersion in the techniques and practises of radio drama and having had detailed discussions on the approaches to creating drama for radio I think I have some idea. Jesper, for me, was like a therapist or analyst who interrogated the work, forcing the writer to crystallize his or her ideas about their play – what it is and what it isn’t. I certainly came away with fresh approaches on how I can rework a short play I have already written. I can see now that I haven’t been completely honest in how I let the story develop. I am now prepared to go back to it and let the play’s own logic emerge truly and run its course, and then let’s see what happens.
I’m really surprised by how energised I feel about the prospect of revisiting the play. I’m still not exactly sure what a dramaturge does, but in this case it seems to have worked.
Thanks to the team at RTE Radio Drama for inviting us in. You can listen to the winning plays and a host of other radio plays here on the RTE archive.
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