Ian Watson wrote this outline of Yorkshire Playwrights' successes and plans in 1998. We are never short of plans. The search for some kind of funding stability goes on.

In the last three years, Yorkshire Playwrights has been developing and honing its free script-reading scheme (now called simply Scriptread) and has provided well over 500 individual reports on playscripts (for theatre, radio and television). Feedback from writers has been almost entirely positive and has oozed gratitude, but the scheme has remained a source of some frustration to YP itself.

£12 a script is scarcely sufficient to ward off the vapours in a reader faced with the unremitting gush of poor quality scripts, arid the fact is that the scheme offers too little to bring in the better scripts which are undoubtedly Out there.

Scriptread has nevertheless chalked up the odd success. Judith Adams's Burdalane came to YP first and was given a preliminary workshop under YP's auspices by the York Theatre Royal company directed by John Doyle. A further week-long workshop on the play would have ensued had events not intervened: the National workshopped it, it was commissioned and broadcast by BBC Radio 4 and it was produced on stage at Battersea Arts Centre. Judith herself subsequently teamed up with Deborah Paige at the Sheffield Crucible, where her adaptation of Charlotte Bronte's Villette has recently been produced.

Two other writers who have submitted themselves to the Scriptread process have also seen subsequent success. Jackie Everett (currently the YP Chair) is one of three writers selected (from a submission of around 80) in the Yorkshire Television area to have her script Trespass filmed for inclusion in the Yorkshire/TyneTees/Granada New Voices initiative. Another one of the three was Mary Cooper, a founder member of YP and one of its panel of readers, whose script Alarmed, written with Peter Spafford, has already been transmitted in the YTV and Granada areas. Liz Wainwright, a former YP Chair who has also been through the Scriptread mill, was one of only four English playwrights to have a script selected for the programme of the 4th International Women Playwrights Conference in Galway in June. Her play Mixed Company was one of 85 from 25 different countries to be featured during the conference, and is now to receive a further reading at West Yorkshire Playhouse.

Coincidentally (or perhaps not, given that the man with the initiative is called Patrick O'Sullivan), it was in Galway that YP's International Playwrights Exchange first took root. Three years ago, YP member David Griffiths took a small production of one of his plays and undertook some mask workshops with colleagues in Galway. In the interim, ceaselessly surfing the net, Patrick O'Sullivan has made contacts for YP in Texas, Montreal, Italy, France and other parts of the world; and on April 18 and 19, this networking produced results when, in partnership with the West Yorkshire Playhouse and the Dutch and Flemish theatre institutes, YP hosted a weekend symposium to mark the publication by Nick Hem Books of Dutch and Flemish Plays. The playwright Judith Herzberg and sundry dramaturgs from Holland and Belgium were in attendance as readings from the translated texts were given by Playhouse actors, and participated in, discussion on the British, Dutch and Flemish experience of getting new writing on stage.

The International Playwrights Exchange took another step forward at the end of June, when, in addition to the Women Playwrights' conference in Galway, Yorkshire Playwrights sent delegates to the Ljubljana conference on Culture in Balance: Text Crossing Borders.

Meanwhile, partnership seems to hold most of the future hopes of Yorkshire Playwrights. Damian Cruden, with whom YP worked closely on several workshops during his time as associate at Hull Truck, has been appointed to the artistic directorship of York Theatre Royal and, even before getting his feet under the desk, has signalled his wish to work closely with YP on developing new writing programmes for the theatre. A new production company, Headrow Productions, which has substantial cross-membership with YP, has received Arts4Everyone Express funding (from Arts Council Lottery funds) to launch a regular fringe theatre programme in Leeds, in which it sees YP as an essential partner. YP itself hopes to find more new ways of developing and workshopping plays...watch this space!