"Live art, performance art, physical theatre, whatever you call it, British theatre needs it, and The Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award is ideally placed to act as a catalyst in years to come. It is so important as it allows an exciting, upcoming director or company to take their work to the next level." Mark Ravenhill
Romilly spent many years managing both the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award and shepherding the theatre directors that the OSBTT sought to guide into the limelight. She was continuously on the look out for risky, bold and experimental theatre and companies daring to break with convention in terms of acting style, dialogue, costuming and sets.
But her role as Director of the OSBTT was not always an easy one, and while the vision for a new generation of innovative and challenging theatre remained central to her work, Romilly sometimes had to make hard choices and accept disappointment when rising stars failed to connect with audiences or could not sustain their success in the long term.
Romilly's own impact was longer-lasting however. In 2007 she approached the Barbican’s head of theatre, Louise Jeffreys, to pitch a role for the Barbican in incubating avant-garde theatre companies around the United Kingdom. At the time, Jeffreys said: "We don’t usually work with emerging practitioners and I thought that it would be good to complete the circle of work that we do, that once a year we’re helping someone right at the beginning of their career."
From 2007 onwards, the Barbican began to offer administrative and production support and a financial top-up to the Oxford Samuel Becket Theatre Trust award. But this internationally reknown and prestigious venue went even further, helping to identify a mentor to periodically attend rehearsals and providing award recipients with a week of rehearsal time in the Pit before opening. In a further innovation introduced by Romilly, recipients were also given a research and development grant by OSBTT even before starting their rehearsals.
With 2007’s OSBBT winner, Boileroom, a practically unknown company opened for the first time in the Pit with ‘The Terrific Electric’. Co-director Vanessa-Faye Stanley said, "all theatre involves taking a risk. It’s risky to get up on stage and present a straight play. Our project is about electricity and inventions. We want to create a parallel sense of discovery and energy and imagination and crazy invention."
It was just the type of thing that Romilly was looking for.
RECENT WINNERS OF THE OXFORD SAMUEL BECKETT THEATRE TRUST AWARD
2014: Dickie Beau's Camera Lucida
28th October - 8th November 2014, the Pit Theatre, Barbican.
The winner of the OSBTT 2014 Award was Camera Lucida, conceived and executed by Dickie Beau. A pioneering artist whose work spans theatre, cabaret and mime, Dickie Beau elevates the drag tradition of lip-synching through a performance style known as "playback".
In Camera Lucida, Dickie Beau used salvaged audio recordings that he edited into digital scripts, channeling extraordinary voices on stage, creating an eerie archive of those who might otherwise be lost, or are no longer living. Research and Development grants were awarded to Dickie Beau and to Bruno Humberto.
2013: The Paper Architect, Kristin & Davy McGuire
Kristin & Davy McGuire create theatrical interventions with paper pop-up books, projections, performance, automation and animation. The Paper Architect tells the tale of a lonely man who longs for a life he never lived. Secluded in his workshop, he builds intricate paper models that become vessels for his eccentric dreams and melancholic memories.
