Open to Ideas: Spring 2025

Open to Ideas, our residency programme, is back for 2025! We are offering three R&D residencies to support Scottish theatremakers to test out new ideas.

We don’t expect you to hold a sharing at the end of the week (though you can if you want to) and we aren’t promising to programme the work in the future. Instead, it’s a genuine offer for you to experiment, explore and get an idea up on its feet.

We’re excited by ideas that have something to say about contemporary Scotland, new musicals, devised work, family work, and total theatre stuff with big heart and low tech. We’re less interested in script development, adaptations or remounts of existing texts, abstract academics and magic shows.

Here’s what we can offer:

Five days of rehearsal space in The Studio, Edinburgh

Two days of technical support if you need it

£2000 in seed funding

Here are the dates we have available:

Residency 1: 17-21 March 2025

Residency 2: 14-18 April 2025

Residency 3: 23-27 June 2025

Eligibility criteria

You must be based in Scotland

You must have worked on at least one professional production previously. This can include Fringe performances but not university productions or amateur dramatics.

You must not be in receipt of RFO funding from Creative Scotland.

You must be available during your selected residency period

You must be applying for a new project that has not already been commissioned, produced or coproduced, or staged by another organisation

We will be ringfencing one of these residencies for someone based in Edinburgh and the Lothians. We’ll also be aiming to support theatremakers at different stages in their career so are interested in applications from both new and more experienced applicants.

Here is how to apply:

Please complete the application by midnight on Sun 16 February. You can complete this with written answers or video application.

If you would like to download a dyslexia-friendly version of the form you can do so here.

We will let you know whether you are successful or not on Friday 21 February by email.

If you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch at engage@capitaltheatres.com