The RE Ross Trust Playwrights' Script Development Awards: Winners 2006

The 2006 Awards were judged by David Pledger (Convenor), Rachel Burke and Todd MacDonald.

Judges report

Among the 39 entries there were three outstanding scripts demanding commensurate investment in a dramaturgical process including a workshop and a reading. There were a number of other scripts worthy of consideration for further development. Each of these would benefit from a reading, enabling the writer to hear their ideas and dialogue out loud in a critical and constructive environment. Two scripts were chosen from this category. Overall, entries fell in either of these categories, although several scripts were ready for production and required no further development.

In general, the final entries were distinguished by the quality of their writing, a playfulness of invention with the theatrical form and a serious approach to ideas mixed with an ingenious handling of humour and irony.

The winners

Do Not Go Gentle...

Patricia Cornelius ($9000)

This is a brilliantly humorous excavation of the ageing process. The writer uses the story of Scott’s failed attempt to conquer the South Pole as an allegorical parallel to the lives of the residents of an aged care facility. As the walls of the allegory collapse, the characters' lives are exposed in all their human frailty. The play vividly contrasts the intimate and domestic with the epic and universal, until it finally crashes through into a vital, compassionate rendering of the human condition.

This work is also written with great attention to its visualisation. The overarching ‘journey’ and the characters’ stories unfold in the magically real world of an 'ice-scape' which acts as a portal to the hospice room the residents occupy. This serves the action of the play and offers a wonderful sense of the design for stage.

This is a beautiful script that requires a final, intensive dramaturgical process.

The Flower of Malaya

Suzanne Ingleton ($2000)

This play deals with one of Australia’s most significant Asian neighbours in a historical dramatic context. The writer crosses local theatrical forms such as the wayang kulit puppet-play with Western conventions such as documentary and narrative drama and contemporary media in the form of video. The work requires a judicious dramaturgical process but will be served best by a reading so that the writer may hear how her dialogue and the interplay of forms in the script are working in the current draft. This will help position the project for its next stage of development.

Colder

Lachlan Philpott ($10,000)

A beautiful, ambient and abstract meditation on the emotional landscape built around the events of a child and a loved one gone missing. Full of emotional ambiguities and unfulfilled desires, this work encapsulates the horror of not-knowing within a dramatic architecture of grief and despair.

The theatrical conceit of the chorus and the doubling up of characters across time and place, the poetic language and potent imagery ensure the work remains with the reader long after it is read. Challenging and absorbing on the page, this work demands to be heard.

Egg Shell

Monica Raszewski ($2000)

The writer takes the audience on an elegant sashay through a non-naturalistic world of migration and inter-generational relationships. An Eastern European mother and daughter take a cheap bus trip to Paris, and have fictional and imagined encounters which draw them together whilst simultaneously pulling them apart. This is an inventive take on the different journeys of first- and second-generation migrants, told with a poetic sense of revelation through a distinct cultural voice. The work will benefit from a refined dramaturgical process.

I Shot the Albatross (But I Taught It How to Land)

Vivienne Walshe ($7000)

Mad, absurdist and disturbing, this work surprises with the latitude it gives to the morally corrupt and the morally corruptible. It uses the convention of the stranger who rides into town and turns it upside-down and inside-out. Family life is disinterred: children first, parents second. There are no lifeboats on this cruise into second-rate psychoanalysis and first-rate decadence. What is not up for grabs is not worth fighting for, and what is up for grabs is everything smutty, sexy, sweaty and sexual.

The work was seemingly written in a frenzy, yet the writer has harnessed this energy with a controlled discipline and come up with a work of audacious originality. Family life will never be the same again.

About the winners

Patricia Cornelius

Patricia Cornelius is a founding member of Melbourne Workers’ Theatre and an award-winning playwright. She has written over 20 plays, including Love, Lilly and May, Jack’s Daughters, Max, Platform, Who’s Afraid of the Working Class and Fever. Her first novel, My Sister Jill, was published by Random House in 2002.

Sue Ingleton

Sue Ingleton is an award-winning actor, director and writer in theatre and television. She has written seven plays including Aunts With Hot Flushes and After You’ve Gone, and has toured and performed in one-woman shows throughout Australia and internationally. As a stand-up comedian she has toured North America, the UK, New Zealand and Malaysia. Flower of Malaya was written in Malaysia on an Asialink grant.

Lachlan Philpott

Lachlan Philpott began writing plays while studying directing at the Victorian College of the Arts. His first play, Bison, was a hit at the Midsumma Festival in 2000 and established his ongoing collaboration with director Alyson Campbell. Lachlan has completed the NIDA Playwrights Studio, has worked widely in youth arts and until recently was the Artistic Director of Tantrum Theatre in Newcastle. His other plays include Catapult, Running under the Sprinkler, Bustown and Air Torture.

Monica Raszewski

Monica Raszewski is an author of plays and fiction. Her plays include Open Case; the radio play Forest, which was broadcast on ABC radio; and White Mud, which was performed at The Stables in Sydney in 1997. Her play Three Oaks premiered at La Mama in Melbourne in 2006.

Vivienne Walshe

Vivienne Walshe is a playwright, actor and screenwriter. She has worked with many state theatre companies and regularly performs in Australia. Her second play, God’s Last Acre, won the Malcolm Robertson Award and was performed at the Malthouse Theatre Company. Her third play, Birth Nation, won the Max Afford Award. Walshe has written commissions for the Melbourne Theatre Company and the Sydney Theatre Company.