If this is the end of Europe, what are we going to do about it?

Ten years ago, I ran my first International Workshop at Sala Beckett’s Obrador d’estiu. I have been back every year for the past decade. Each year I choose a question to focus my work around. Ten years ago the question asked if the playwrights were facing “The End of Europe.”

It is a question that I have often returned to in my mind over the past decade.

Over the course of that time I have become increasingly aware that the Obrador d’estiu is one of the most exciting meetings of theatre practitioners in the continent. I wanted the opportunity to take the gesture of the international workshop to a higher, more concentrated level.

We have chosen seven of the most exciting writers to have emerged from our time together and invited them back to work together for an intense period of time. In this workshop, the writers will lead the workshops themselves. I will host them and curate them and try to focus their work. We will run a series of writing exercises together; we will consider the political and economic and cultural climates in which all the writers will be working; we will share strategies and problems; we will discuss opportunities and possibilities. It will be a great honour to chair the group around the considerations of how the most exciting emerging playwrights in Europe are responding and can respond to a continent that seems to have remained in crisis for the time I have worked in that beautiful city.

I guess if this workshop has a question is: “If this is the end of Europe, what are we going to do about it?”

Simon Stephens