Vicky Featherstone transformed the Royal Court, throwing the doors wide open

She began as she meant to go on: Featherstone’s first summer festival in 2013, Open Court, handed the keys of the building to writers of all ages (including children), effectively getting them to programme the six weeks. What took place was sometimes ragged, but always full of life. As Matt Trueman observed in the Guardian: “Even those pieces that could readily be described as ‘plays’ were fantastically varied. New writing felt up for grabs in a way it hasn’t for years.” Forty-five percent of the audience that came had never been to the Royal Court before.

The past decade has continued that ongoing experiment. Featherstone’s instinct to diversify the programme and the audience manifested itself in many ways, upping the number of female writers, international voices and stories, asking questions about what new writing is and whether it can be design-led, and what it means to take up space in a place such as the Royal Court. It also asked how the theatre can be a platform for work made elsewhere, such as Ryan Calais Cameron’s hit For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy, which arrived at the Royal Court from the New Diorama and now moves to the West End.

Featherstone’s Court has reflected the 21st-century world and responded provocatively and urgently to Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. In the case of the latter, Featherstone proved her leadership – both publicly and behind the scenes – and made space for British theatre to voice the unvoiced: it has an ongoing abuse problem.

At the start of 2018, Featherstone rose in The Stage’s annual list of theatre’s 100 most influential players to the top spot, for her leadership around #MeToo. It is a leadership that has manifested itself in her support – sometimes clearly visible, sometimes offered quietly and self-effacingly – for those denied access to British theatre or a voice in it for too long. Featherstone is a woman with a fully working moral compass.

It has held her in good stead in moments of crisis, particularly in 2021, when a Silicon Valley billionaire in Al Smith’s Rare Earth Mettle was revealed to bear the Jewish name Hershel Fink. Accused of antisemitism, initially the Court claimed unconscious bias at work but when challenged, Featherstone and her team had direct dialogue with the Jewish community and didn’t just pledge to long-term change but started putting in the work to do it. One of the results was last year’s Jews. In Their Own Words.  

In an early interview with The Stage, shortly after joining the Court, Featherstone declared she wanted to have a hit play that transformed the theatrical landscape, to “give a platform to a writer who changes the way writers think about theatre – another Brecht, Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane”.

To date, she hasn’t had the Black Watch-style triumph she enjoyed at the National Theatre of Scotland, and she hasn’t obviously found the next Sarah Kane, although there have been plenty of significant and juicy new writers and directors, from Jasmine Lee-Jones (seven methods of killing kylie jenner) to Nicôle Lecky (Superhoe) and Cordelia Lynn (Lela and Co).

If the impression is sometimes that under Featherstone the main stage has been a less consistent hit factory than under her predecessors, that may be because she has been painstakingly engaged in doing something more important: laying the deep foundations that ensure the Royal Court can continue to be a premier new-writing theatre, because its doors are wide open to talent and it has the right toolkit in place to nurture and support that talent. However long it takes.