Has script development led to top-down theatre?

From The Guardian (U.K.):

Veteran director and playwright Peter (The York Realist) Gill has something interesting to say in this response to Channel 4's The Play's the Thing, and the way new plays are developed these days. I'm just not sure what it is. He seems to think that playwrights are too much under the thumb of the producer and director, which might have been the case on The Play's the Thing. (I don't know that either; we didn't see it over here.) But if so, that's just bad script development. And when Mr. Gill holds up John Osborne's Look Back in Anger as an example of the sort of awkward but interesting play that makes today's theatre look puny and gangly, he sounds an awful lot like Noel Coward when he famously used the plays of an earlier generation to bat Look Back in Anger about the head.

 

Toronto Gold: Indian-born playwright takes top honors with "Bombay Black"

From Rediff.com (India):

Mumbai-born playwright Anosh Irani finds success in Canada, winning a Dora Mavor Moore Award for his new play Bombay Black (and leaving his much better-known countryman, A.R. [Bombay Dreams, Lord of the Rings] Rahman in the dust).

 

Surviving death: play lives on

From the Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky)

Louisville playwright Joe Crosser had one wish: that his script about living with brain cancer would survive his passing. This year, he gets that wish.