The Louis Esson Prize for Drama: Judges 2005

Melanie Beddie (Convenor)
Melanie Beddie is a graduate of Sydney University and VCA where she trained as an actor. She now works as an actor, director and dramaturg. She was co-founder of the $5 Theatre Co. and is artistic director of the independent theatre company The BRANCH. Her directorial work includes Traitors by Stephen Sewell and her own adaption of Killing Games by Eugene Ionesco, Second Childhood adapted by Glenn Perry from Morris Gleitzman, Raindancers by Karin Mainwaring, Diving for Pearls by Katherine Thompson, Geese and the PsychWard (La Mama). She has worked as a dramaturg for both Playworks and Playbox and in 1999 was the resident dramaturg at the MTC. In 2002 she co-founded the Dramaturgies forum ­ an independent organization which is dedicated to exploring the practical application of dramaturgy in current theatre practice.

Raimondo Cortese
Raimondo Cortese graduated from the VCA School of Drama in 1993 and is a founding member of Ranters Theatre, of which he was the Artistic Director from 1994 to 2000. His plays include: Lucrezia and Cesare, The Room, The Large Breast or the Upside-Down Bell, The Fertility of Objects, Features of Blown Youth, Roulette, St Kilda Tales and The Wall. A collection of short stories, The Indestructible Corpse, appeared in 1998. His experimental writing includes Variations of the Same, Bruitgrammes 1-77, Vastexts, Heresies and Manifesto for a Theatre of Perpetual Disorder. He has also written for film, television and radio. Raimondo has exhibited in group exhibitions of visual texts in Australia and overseas, with solo shows in Melbourne and Pisa, Italy.

Peta Murray
Peta Murray is a playwright, dramaturg, and sessional teacher of writing at RMIT, and the University of Melbourne. Her best-known play, Wallflowering, has had numerous productions in Australia and overseas. Salt won the Victorian Premier’s Award for Drama in 2001. Other works include Spitting Chips, an adaptation of Tim Winton’s Blueback, The Procedure and The Keys to the Animal Room which won the Australian Writers’ Guild’s Major Award in 1994. In 2003 Peta received a Centenary Medal for services to society and literature. In 2004 she spent 6 blissful months as writer-in-residence at the Australia Council’s Keesing Studio in Paris.