They-don't-work-shops

In The Guardian, playwright Mark Ravenhill explains why he hates theatre-writing workshops. Especially the ones he runs himself.

The trouble is, the more I write, the less I feel I know about writing - certainly, the less I feel I can articulate what is going on when I'm doing it. And the more suspicious I become of anything that pretends to be a rule of playwriting. But tell a workshop participant that there are no rules, that they need to discover what a play means to them and write something that is unique to their sense of the world, and you are likely to be faced with a sullen customer who feels they aren't getting their money's worth. And a black mark on your "How helpful was this workshop?" evaluation form at the end.