Mahlon Prince's new play examines a parasocial relationship.
The writer and director on running a youth theatre company for ten years, on returning to writing, and on new play Patient Vultures at VAULT Festival.
Hello, and welcome to The Crush Bar, a weekly newsletter about theatre written by me, Fergus Morgan.
We are back at VAULT Festival for the penultimate time for this week’s issue: it’s a promo interview with Mahlon Prince, writer and director of Patient Vultures, which runs at the festival for four performances next week.
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That’s all for now. A bit more from me at the bottom, but first: Mahlon Prince!
For years, Mahlon Prince wrote plays out of necessity, rather than a burning passion for playwriting.
Prince founded Daydreamer, a youth theatre group in Watford for aspiring actors between the ages of 10 and 21, for a decade between 2006 and 2016 – and its members needed something to perform. Rather than pay to stage existing works, though, Prince simply wrote them himself.
“I had to feed the beast,” Prince says. “I had a huge cohort of kids. I had four different classes, all needing material to work with, so I was just constantly writing. It was great. I really miss it, actually. A lot of people think of youth theatre as a ghetto and want to escape it. Not me. I loved it.”
Prince missed writing so much, in fact, that he recently decided to return to it pre-lockdown. Patient Vultures, which opens next week at VAULT Festival, is technically his professional debut. “Well, that’s a bit of a lie,” he says. “I’ve written loads of plays for youth theatres. I’ve done bits and pieces elsewhere, too. This is just the first full-length play of mine to be performed by professional actors.”
Patient Vultures is a two-hander, produced, written and directed by Prince, and featuring actors Isabella Heaver and Hannah Turner as Jade and Neave. Jade is the founder of a successful tech start-up, whose life is derailed after she makes an unplanned public rant. Neave is the journalist that covers her case. In an Alistair McDowall-ish twist, their stories move in opposite directions – Jade’s forwards in time, and Neave’s backwards – colliding on the day they meet, the day Jade died.
The play is the result of a confluence of different inspirations, explains Prince. The title comes from Kevin Carter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo The Vulture And The Little Girl, the time-twisting structure from watching Christopher Nolan films. And the characters from an opening line that popped into Prince’s head: “I’m young, rich, pretty and white. And I’m tired of apologising for it.”
“I had a catalyst, a character and a structure,” Prince says. “Then I just had to come up with a plot to fit. I wanted to explore parasocial relationships, which are relationships you feel like you have with someone because you’ve engaged with their content online. I’m interested in the divide between public and private personas, and the divide between the creation and consumption of media.”
“There I was at 21, directing a Timberlake Wertenbaker play, with her in the room…”
Born in 1985, Prince grew up in Watford, and fell in love with theatre through youth groups at Watford Palace Theatre. He started running workshops himself as a teenager, then formed his own youth theatre – Daydreamer – when he was 20. The first show he directed with it was a production of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Arden City as part of the National Theatre’s Connections programme.
“My production was one of the ten that got chosen to be performed at the showcase at the National Theatre,” Prince remembers. “Back then, if you got selected, the writer would come and visit you in the rehearsal room. Timberlake Wertenbaker is one of my heroes. And there I was at 21, directing a Timberlake Wertenbaker play, with her in the room. It was amazing. She was really lovely.”
In the mid-2000s, Prince completed several training programmes: a Theatre Royal Haymarket Masterclass, the Royal Court Young Writers programme, then an MA in Applied Theatre at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. By the time he finished them, though, he was already writing regularly for the stage: Daydreamer was growing and growing, and Prince had to feed the beast.
Prince stopped writing when he wound down Daydreamer in 2016. In the years since, he has been busy running DMLK Video, a production company he co-founded with Daydreamer alumnus George Day. The company has been a huge success, producing content for both corporate clients – Accenture, Huawei, PayPal, and others – and theatre organisations like Paines Plough, Soho Theatre and VAULT Festival. In 2020 and 2021, it collaborated with producer Francesca Moody on Shedinburgh Fringe Festival, the online lockdown charity alternative to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
“Nowadays, we are in a privileged position where we can pick and choose our clients,” Prince says of his work with DMLK Video. “The corporate stuff makes us money so we can pay our bills, but we really love the work we do in the creative sector. That is what really fires our imaginations.”
DMLK Video’s success, though, left Prince with little time or need to write plays, and so he stopped. He had been constantly writing for the stage for a decade: then, suddenly, he wasn’t. It was during lockdown that he realised how much he missed it, and that he would love to put pen to paper again, so Daydreamer was reborn. This time, though, Prince would not be writing for students, he would be writing for himself. He could explore the characters, the themes, the plot, and the structure in which he was interested.
“When I ran Daydreamer, I had to write stuff for huge casts of kids,” Prince says. “It was like herding cats. I spent most of my time in front of a spreadsheet, working out where and who everyone was. Patient Vultures has been different. I didn’t have to write it. I wanted to write it. I don’t have any real plans for it or anything. Just putting it on is enough, really. I just want to have fun with it.”
What do you want to do?
We actually put Patient Vultures on as a preview pre-lockdown, and we were going to do it at VAULT Festival last year, before it got cancelled. I’m just happy it is finally being performed. I just want people to come see it.
I do have other projects I’m working on. I’m adapting Patient Vultures for television. I am imagining it as the first episode of three in a limited series.
I’m working on a couple of other shows, too. The next one is called Gretel, as in Hansel and Gretel. It casts the character of Gretel as a contemporary adult whose younger brother has just released a tell-all memoir. Then there is More, which reimagines Dickens’ Great Expectations as a modern-day musical infused with hip-hop and spoken word.
What support do you need to get there?
Just come and see the show. And, if you like it, tell people. That’s the only currency that really means something. If people connect with it, and tell other people that it is awesome, then that would be great.
How can people find out more about you?
I’m not very online, I’m afraid, but my assistant director has set up an Instagram account for us. You can get tickets for the show at VAULT Festival. You can look on the DMLK Video website. Other than that, smoke signals might work.
That’s it for now. I’ll be back in your inboxes on Monday with the final VAULT Festival issue: five shows to see during the eighth and last week of VAULT Festival - and the last week ever in its current home. After that, this newsletter will be going on a break until April.
One final reminder about the various ways you can support this newsletter: you can share it with anyone you think might be interested, you can become a paid subscriber using the button at the top, or you can get in touch with me about using it for promotional purposes.
That’s all. Thanks for reading. If you want to get in touch for any reason, just reply to this email or contact me via Twitter - I’m @FergusMorgan. See you in a week!
Fergus