The Louis Esson Prize for Drama: Shortlist 2004

Judges

Richard Buckham (Convenor), Melanie Beddie and John Romeril

This year’s plays push politics further into the limelight, adding to the catalogue of theatre works in recent years that have explored conflicts and dynamics between Australia and Asia, the bush and the city, Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, human rights and the corporate state -- and so on.

In addition to the shortlist, we would like to offer commendations to two plays in particular. Two Lost Coins by Kit Lazaroo is a stylish and intriguing work, dealing with Australia’s place in the world in a very beguiling way. Night Letters, by writer Susan Rogers and director Chris Drummond, inspired by Robert Dessaix’s novel. This adaptation both illuminates the original work, and is a striking theatrical achievement in its own right.

Our shortlist brings together three major new works of Australian political theatre.

Shortlist

Falling Petals
Ben Ellis
Playbox/Currency
Falling Petals uses both mystery and raw confrontation to draw us into the world of Hollow, a middle-sized regional city where the young are dying of unknown causes. This tight, powerful play never lets the metaphors get comfortable, and its big political questions are as fundamental and brutal as the survival instinct itself.

Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America: A Drama in 30 Scenes
Stephen Sewell
Playbox/Currency
Stephen Sewell’s play is remarkable for its scope and audacity, taking us to the ideological centre of the ‘war on terror’ and revealing the devastating cost of it to nations and individuals, and to civil liberties and intellectual freedoms. Sewell’s play is a polemic with a tragic undertow; its theatrical achievement is to show us one man destroyed by fear and compromise, and the implications for ourselves and our times.

Wonderlands
Katherine Thomson
Currency
Wonderlands is a deeply felt work that invites great intimacy between its characters and its audience. Shifting between the 1930s and the present, the play is about a country property, the white family that farms it, and their links to the local Indigenous people. Over the years these links are strengthened then severed, then buried and finally denied. Thomson’s drama alludes to a vast, hidden history, now necessary for us to confront and understand.