Paines Plough

Paines Plough is touring theatre company founded in 1974 by writer David Pownall and director John Adams. They named the company after their favourite pub, the Plough, where they would drink pints of Paines.

The company specialises exclusively in commissioning and producing new plays and helping playwrights develop their craft.

In 2005, Paines Plough launched Future Perfect in conjunction with Channel 4. The scheme is a year-long attachment for emerging playwrights. Writers who have taken part include Lizzie Nunnery, Tom Morton-Smith and Duncan Macmillan.

Over the past four decades, Paines Plough has established itself as a leading new writing company producing work by a wide range of playwrights across the UK and abroad. Collaboration with other theatre organisations is a vital feature of the company’s work.

Founder John Adams handed the Artistic Directorship to John Chapman in 1982. Pip Broughton succeeded in 1985, followed by Anna Furse (1990), Penny Ciniewicz (1994), Vicky Featherstone (1997) and Roxana Silbert (2005). The current Artistic Directors James Grieve and George Perrin took up post on 1 February 2010.

In October 2010, the company won a TMA award for special achievement in regional theatre.

Famous quotes containing the words paines and/or plough:

    A pilgrim I on earth perplext,
    with sinns, with cares and sorrows vext,
    By age and paines brought to decay,
    and my Clay house mouldring away,
    Oh how I long to be at rest
    and soare on high among the blest!
    Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612–1672)

    It is the women of Europe who pay the price while war rages, and it will be the women who will pay again when war has run its bloody course and Europe sinks down into the slough of poverty like a harried beast too spent to wage the fight. It will be the sonless mothers who will bend their shoulders to the plough and wield in age-palsied hands the reaphook.
    Kate Richards O’Hare (1877–1948)