In response to the Monsterists

David Farr in The Guardian responds to the group of writers calling themselves Monsterists who want to see more writers commissioned to write large scale plays with big casts. Such plays, argues Farr, who is artistic director at the Lyric Hammersmith, are perhaps better left to collaborative work rather than the single writer.

As artistic director of a large-scale theatre, I am often engaging with a young audience who have a phenomenal visual sophistication and relatively little literary sophistication. My mission is to use one to help develop the other. The fragmentary, often self-referential narratives in film and music educate a modern audience to want similar formal complexity in theatre. This is much easier to explore in a rehearsal room than in a writer's office.