British plays are a huge cultural export. Why don’t we talk about that more?

Personally, I’m also fascinated by the ways in which more culturally specific work travels. British director Rikki Henry recently staged David Ireland’s Ulster American for the Schaubühne and I’d love to know how that play’s brand of humour landed in a different cultural context. I recently saw a Hungarian production of David Greig’s The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, by director Dániel D Kovács for independent Budapest theatre Stúdió K Színház, and it turns out that with a good translation, a Scottish verse play written to be staged as a cèilidh can connect with Hungarian audiences. One of the most interesting things about seeing a lot of European work is the new and often quite culturally distinct takes on familiar plays.

There are separate conversations to be had about why there’s no equivalent flow of European writing to UK stages and the colonial overtones of this process

There are a variety of reasons why British plays are so prevalent on the continent: the cultural dominance of English, the fact that our text-centric theatre culture means we simply produce more new plays, and the demands of the ensemble system. The Children, for example, is a gift to a theatre looking to find juicy roles for its older performers.

There are separate conversations to be had about why there’s no equivalent flow of European writing to UK stages and the colonial overtones of this process, as well as about which UK playwrights are granted this international platform. But it’s hard not to notice that few of the conversations about the crisis in new writing, the impact of cutbacks and the dwindling opportunities in the UK take into account the status of British writers on the continent and beyond – and this feels like an oversight.