QUESTSTORIES
THE QUESTORS NEW PLAYS FESTIVALS
10th Festival 1969

Extracts from
THE NEW PLAYS FESTIVAL IN RETROSPECT
by Martin Bowletyy
[Questopics, August 1969]

"At the end of our tenth festival...Mr Young's estimate of our aims is still true, and, with record attendances reported for this year's plays, his tribute to our audiences is more justified than ever...recent research into the history of the festival has revealed a remarkable proportion of gold among the twenty-six full length and eleven short plays which have been performed at New Plays Festivals. 

"Inevitably Next Time I'll Sing To You remains the outstanding success of the past ten years with its West End run of nearly two hundred performances in 1963, its Evening Standard award and its numerous productions in the country, on the continent and in the United States, but it is not alone in having gone on from The Questors to other productions. 

"Dannie Abse's The House of Cowards was produced by the Welsh Theatre Company in Cardiff, and Gone was broadcast on the Third Programme and has been produced at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, on the continent and in the United States.

"James Saunders' Barnstable was also broadcast on the Third Programme and subsequently presented at the Dublin Festival in 1961 and at the Comedy Theatre in London, while The Pedagogue was produced at the Aldwych Theatre in 1964, by the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of Expeditions One.

Walter Lever's The Guy was produced by the International Theatre Club at the Mercury Theatre and David Shellan's It Was Never So Merry, My Lord was produced at Richmond Theatre last year, while no fewer than three of the plays—Albert Bennett's The Work Out, Ken Fraser's The Igloo and Roy Minton's Death in Leicester have been performed at Edinburgh. Six of the plays have been published—three of them in Dannie Abse's volume of Three Questor Plays—and The House of Cowards won the Charles Henry Foyle New Play Award for 1959-60, and was chosen by J.C. Irwin as one of the Plays of the Year. "

Martin Bowley's Article in full