The Stage

Playing with time - Kate Pakenham and the 24 Hour Plays

Published Friday 10 June 2005 at 12:20 by Aleks Sierz

Kate Pakenham has taken on the herculean task of organising the writing, rehearsal and performance of six plays, all in one day at the Old Vic. She tells Aleks Sierz how The 24 Hour Plays, which is being staged on Sunday with celebrities and in July with young talent, brings out the best in its participants

A good producer needs two things - intuition and an inexhaustible supply of adrenaline. Kate Pakenham has both, which is just as well, as she is producing the Old Vic’s The 24 Hour Plays, in which a new company creates and stages six ten-minute plays, all between one evening and the next.

“I first came across 24-hour plays in New York and was blown away by the sheer excitement of the idea,” says 30-year-old Pakenham. “Last year, we brought the concept to London as a celebrity fundraiser.” Its stars included Kwame Kwei-Armah, Meera Syal, Jim Broadbent, Brian Cox and Sophie Okonedo.

This year, the celebrity event hits the stage on Sunday, June 19 and features Ewen Bremner, Gina McKee, Rufus Sewell, Saffron Burrows and Miriam Margoyles. “It was amazing to see how good the plays were last year,” says Pakenham. “So it will be good to see this year’s team rise to the challenge.”

The last event raised £50,000. This year, the Old Vic is also hosting a talent contest version of The 24 Hour Plays, created by 50 or so actors, directors and writers aged 18-25. Sponsored by Starbucks, this will take place on July 31. It will be a milestone in Pakenham’s work as the producer of Old Vic New Voices.

In 2001, she was working in television when the Old Vic’s Sally Greene recruited her. “I said, ‘What’s my job?’ and she said, ‘I like the idea of new talent, new faces.’ So I said, ‘What about calling it New Voices?’ And she said, ‘Great title.’ She also told me that there was no budget, so I’d have to do my own fundraising.”

Initially, Pakenham used the Old Vic rehearsal space for play readings, then in 2003 she developed an exchange programme with New York, which involved British writers such as Richard Bean, Debbie Tucker Green, Roy Williams and Michael Wynne going there. During one of these exchanges, she saw The 24 Hour Plays.

“They were such great fun,” she says. “The stage radiated pure energy and I thought this would be such a good way of creating a funding basis for Old Vic New Voices.” She now works with American Tina Fallon, whose group, The 24 Hour Company, developed the idea in 1995.

“Tina conceived it as an education project to get kids interested in theatre, so we decided to try that here.” Drawing on her resources of adrenaline, Pakenham has put together both the celebrity event and the new voices talent search.

The way The 24 Hour Plays work is that “everyone comes together in the evening. You bring a prop, a piece of costume and declare a special skill. Last year, for example, Shaun Parkes said that he’d get naked, which no one took him up on”.

Penelope Wilton brought a cycling helmet as her prop and said she’d been learning to tango, but no one had ever asked her to dance. So in Michael Wynne’s short play, Cuba, there was a final moment in which Alex Jennings asks Wilton to tango. Jennings brought a piece of turf, and Abi Morgan wrote The Little People - a short about David Kelly (played by Bill Patterson) - which starts with him watering his lawn.

At 6am, the writers deliver their plays, giving the actors and directors just 12 hours to learn lines and put the work on its feet. “It’s amazing to see the trust among actors, how they help each other if they lose a line,” says Pakenham. “And the audience is really onside too. Last year, I was sitting right at the top of the Old Vic and it was like a Mexican wave of excitement coming off the stage.”

But holding a celebrity event is easier than young newcomers staging 24-hour plays. “Yes, it is ambitious,” admits Pakenham. “Especially as we only started in January.”

She had more than 1,500 applications from young people, including 800 actor applications, and held auditions in April, finally coming up with 52 hopefuls for the July event. These will attend workshops led by some of the celebrities involved, and Pakenham is grateful for the “immense goodwill in the profession”.

At one forum, she got speakers such as Michael Grandage, Ian Rickson and Richard Eyre. “Because there was no money, this massive goodwill allowed Old Vic New Voices to grow.”

At the start, “Everyone said I’d never sell a ticket, but because it’s such an energising idea it has been taken up by actors, directors and writers. I hope that we’ll build relationships with this group of 50 or so young people and see them form relationships with each other. Although 24-hour plays are a bit of a game, you have to be very professional to pull it off.”

With plans afoot to film behind the scenes for a TV documentary, let’s hope this showcase of young talent really takes off.

• Call 0870 060 6628 for tickets.