How Residencies Help New Playwrights Find Their Voice

At Figueres a Escena, we believe that a play begins long before the first rehearsal. It begins in the quiet hours when a writer sits with an idea, half-formed, wondering whether it has legs. Our residency programs for emerging playwrights are designed to meet writers in those hours and stay with them until the work is ready to meet an audience.

This commitment runs through every venue we operate, from the storied stage of Teatre El Jardí to the more intimate Sala La Cate. A residency here is not a prize handed out at a launch night. It is a working arrangement that pairs a writer with space, time, dramaturgical support, and a community of artists who take the new voice seriously. Below, we share how the program actually works and why we think it matters for theatre makers across the world, including the many Australian writers we are keen to keep meeting.

A Framework Built Around the Writer

Each residency begins with a conversation. We sit down with the playwright, talk through the project, and ask the hardest question first: what does this play need that you cannot give it alone? Sometimes the answer is uninterrupted writing time. Sometimes it is a room to read aloud. Sometimes it is a director who will push back. Whatever the answer, we shape the residency around it.

Writers typically spend between four and twelve weeks with us, depending on the scope of the work. They are paid a stipend that recognises writing as labour, not as a hobby. They are given access to a private studio in either of our venues, and they are invited, though never pressured, to drop into rehearsals, school classes at ATEB, or public performances happening around them. The idea is that the writer should feel embedded in a living theatre, not parked in a corner with a laptop.

We deliberately keep the cohort small. Two or three writers at a time, never more. This means the dramaturg, the literary manager, and the producing team can give proper attention to each project. It is closer to a writers' room than a workshop, and it borrows a little from the way Australian ensembles like the one at Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney tend to develop work, where the writer is a long-term collaborator rather than a deliverable.

Mentorship That Respects the Voice

Pairing is the heart of the program. Each resident is matched with a mentor playwright or director whose own work we admire and whose temperament we think will suit. We are careful about this. A mentor who overwhelms the room can do real harm to a first draft, while one who steps too far back can leave a writer stranded on page forty with no idea why the scene keeps sliding off.

Our roster of mentors includes Catalan and Spanish-language playwrights who have premiered work at Teatre El Jardí, as well as international guests who travel through for a season. Past mentors have included writers whose work has toured to the Adelaide Festival and to Queensland Theatre in Brisbane, and we treat those relationships as a two-way street. Australian dramaturgy has a particular rigour, drawn from a sector that lives alongside strong ensemble companies, and our residents often tell us the feedback they receive here reshapes how they approach a script.

The mentorship runs in three stages: an early reading, a mid-residency check-in, and a final showing. None of these are public unless the writer wants them to be. We have learned the hard way that putting a half-finished play in front of a paying audience too early does not build confidence, it erodes it. The mentor's job is to ask the questions the writer is avoiding, and to do it kindly.

Space as a Creative Tool

A residency without a proper room is just a cheque. We are lucky to have two very different rooms to offer, and we use that difference deliberately. A writer working on a chamber piece, something intimate with two or three characters, often begins in Sala La Cate, where the scale of the space keeps the writing grounded. A writer with a bigger canvas, a family show or a piece with chorus, is pointed toward the main stage at El Jardí, where the architecture itself asks questions about scale, sightlines, and the energy of a full house.

You can read more about the main house in El Jardí's wartime history, and it is fair to say the building carries memory in its walls. Writers have told us that simply writing in a room where performances have happened for generations changes the rhythm of their days. They slow down. They listen. They become more curious about what an audience might need from them.

We also open up rehearsal rooms, the costume store, and the ATEB classrooms to residents who want to drop in. Some of our most useful discoveries have come from a playwright sitting in on a children's drama class and writing a scene the next morning that none of us would have imagined otherwise. The residency is not a sealed bubble; it is a door held open.

From Page to Stage

Writing a play is one thing. Hearing it, watching it move, and seeing an audience respond is something else entirely. Every residency at Figueres a Escena includes a development phase where the script is taken into a low-stakes public reading, usually in the format of a scratch night or a closed showing for invited industry guests. Tickets are free or heavily subsidised, and the writer chooses who is in the room.

For residents working on family or children's work, we partner with ATEB and with local schools to test material with the actual audience it is written for. We have written elsewhere about a family show travelling from first rehearsal to opening night, and many of those lessons feed back into how we support our residents. A scene that plays well to actors in a black-box may need a complete rethink once a six-year-old in the front row starts wriggling.

We also broker introductions. A resident finishing their time with us will often leave with at least three meetings set up: a producing contact in Barcelona, a translator if the work is being read in English, and a possible partner festival. For Australian writers in particular, we have built ties with the Sydney Writers' Festival and with independent producers in Melbourne's inner north, and we are honest about the fact that a strong showing in Figueres can open conversations on the other side of the world.

A Relationship with Australian Theatre

Australia punches well above its weight when it comes to new writing. From the long-running hits of the Sydney Theatre Company to the bold experimental work coming out of the Malthouse in Melbourne and the steadily growing sector in Perth and Hobart, there is no shortage of voices. What there can be, however, is a shortage of international context. A writer who has spent three years working only within the Australian funding landscape, navigating rounds from Create NSW or Creative Victoria, can find their work sharper and stranger after a stretch abroad.

That is part of why we look hard for Australian applicants each intake. We have hosted residents from Brisbane who arrived with a script set in suburban Queensland and left with a draft that had absorbed Catalan choral traditions. We have hosted writers from Adelaide who used the residency to dig into First Nations storytelling in collaboration with local elders, and who returned home with new networks across Europe. The exchange goes both ways: our Spanish-language writers benefit from time spent with Australian colleagues who bring a different rhythm of dialogue, a different sense of humour, and a healthy scepticism about anything that feels too tidy.

We keep the application process plain-spoken, because we know that having a go is part of the Australian creative instinct and we do not want paperwork to get in the way. A short sample, a paragraph about the project, and a phone call if you want one. That is the lot.

Life After the Residency

A residency that ends on the final day is a wasted residency. We stay in touch with our graduates, sometimes for years, and we invite them back for premieres, for panel discussions at Sala La Cate, and for occasional residencies in residence, where they return for a short stay to work on a second or third play. Several of our alumni now teach at ATEB, and a few have become mentors themselves, which is exactly the cycle we want.

We also publish excerpts from the work developed with us, in both Catalan and English translation, and we make those scripts available to producing partners through the Australian Writers' Guild and other industry bodies. A writer who has been through the program should leave with more than a polished draft. They should leave with a network, a sense of how their work travels, and the quiet confidence that comes from having been taken seriously.

If you are a playwright with a project that needs time, space, and a room full of people who care about new work, we would love to hear from you. Send us a sample, a paragraph, and a sense of when you would like to come. We read every submission that lands in our inbox, and we will get back to you, no worries.