Young Vic 'Tree' Scandal

Just read to find the Tori Allen-Martin and Sarah Henley, who worked for 4 years alongside Idris Elba on Tree were thrown from the project with no warning. The current YV artistic director- Kwame Kwei-Armah- sounds like a bit of an arsehole...

Read the letter they have wrote;

medium.com/@toriandsarahburnbright/tree-a-story-of-gender-and-power-in-theatre-23b8a2468224

They have also started a new initiative to get new works going. Good to see some light come of a dark situation.

www.burnbright.org.uk/about

Truly disgusting behaviour from Kwame and the YV team. Really has made me have second thoughts on the venue, won't lie!

Yup. Have to say, it's put me right off them if that's how they treat lesser known creative's.

I'm watching the production in Manchester on Saturday. I'll be interested to see if the original writers are credited in any way in the programme notes. It's a horrible way to be treated as they have spent so much time, energy and passion bringing this production to an audience. 

I was thinking of booking for Tree, but it is basically an all-standing play and not possible to book a seat on the Young Vic website. I cannot stand for the length of a play. It's a shame that a theater that once seemed so inclusive is excluding a portion of the theater-going public; or at any rate, making us second-class citizens by restricting how we must book (I think I can phone to make special arrangements for the few available seats). 

There were a very few actual seats available for £10 at the Young Vic when it originally went on sale. I was afraid of it being Here Lies Love The Sequel so I quickly nabbed one for myself. Current debating between just not going, or going but making a tiny scene at the curtain call.

Well gonna take a pretty convincing argument, Kwame, to counter the one the two women have put forward. I read the account posted on twitter. I’m wondering and just wondering, no basis in anything, would this have happened to a couple of men and is it made worse by one of the women being white? I ask because I think that two men might well have experienced the same and I do know of a project that was deemed tricky because it involved a white writer writing a seemingly black story. The project was dropped. What strikes me is number of different levels of engagement required and I expect many such original work has to negotiate all the agencies. But one big question: where does the money come from for this particular play? Out of the Young Vic coffers, sponsorship or what? 'Follow the money' an American once told me, was the mantra for intelligence work. Same in the Arts.

I can't wait for CHF et al to wade in....

On a more serious note, if we can believe all that's written, this does sound truly awful. And the two ladies come across as intelligent, sincere, brave and eloquent in the article they wrote. I do hope they get a resolution to the awful way they seem to have been treated.

Are you comfortable with the director's response? It reminds me of all the news stories and films and everything where the "big guys" are against the "poor girls" who are defending the truth... But I am struggling with words to say my thoughts on this eloquently.

On a flippant note, please can he learn to use the word 'and' rather than just 'n'...

On a serious note, his account of things doesn't sound as credible as Tori and Sarah's version of events. Of course, the truth may well be somewhere between the two. But it is a right mess and should never have been allowed to get to this stage without a fair resolution.

It is doing institutional damage to the Young Vic - which is never desirable.

Is it me, or did he throw Idris under the bus a bit?

And I really don't get how 'I am interested in producing this project but only if it's a totally different project' works - surely if it's really a totally different project you tell them 'sorry, this is not going to work, we're doing something else instead' and don't keep the same basic outline and, err, actual title of the previous project?

The interest was generated by the workshop they produced. If they were only meant to be involved for a workshop surely their contract should have stipulated that? Why send them production dates and say you want them to write another draft and then not actually meet with them - it doesn't matter how complex it is to schedule a date, if you're committed to working with people you find a way to do it, you make sure to give them enough time to free up their diaries, you don't just proceed on your own without them.

The text of his tweet is 279 characters long, there isn't space to turn a single one of those 'n's into an 'and' without sacrificing his word choice, and while some people will choose to sacrifice their phrasing in a social media post in order to make it fit into the box, there's nothing *that* criticisable about choosing to use abbreviations in order to maintain the message as one wishes to deliver it.

I agree with whoever said the truth almost certainly lies somewhere in between the two accounts. I think he's going to "win" at the end of the day, even though some parts of his response letter are really not great, because the person in the position of power usually does, but one does hope that it's one of those things where the involved parties work together towards a resolution than battle against each other. The Young Vic is too good a theatre for dodgy dealings and public squabbles, please let this just be a single horrible blip...

Well there is quite some distance between the two statements, particularly around who refused to meet who. Acknowledging that he will have had less time to prepare than Tori and Sarah, his does take a much more emotive stance which starts to looks like some sort of diversion tactic.  And whilst Tori and Sarah have come up with a great idea to turn the experience into a positive thing for other writers - he seem to want to turn it into an onstage performance which seems to be the opposite of what needs to happen - and possibly an implication that he always wants to do things on his terms.

And the more boring corporate response: youngviclondon.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/a-statement-on-behalf-of-green-door-pictures-manchester-international-festival-mif-and-the-young-vic/