The RE Ross Trust Playwrights' Script Development Awards: Winners 2007

The 2007 Awards were judged by David Pledger (Convenor), Rachel Burke and Todd MacDonald.

Judges’ report

Of almost 40 entries, six scripts have been selected for further development. The successful entries share an ambition to confront conventional theatrical forms, a history of collaboration in the artistic teams and a muscular approach to writing. Of the six, Tom Holloway’s Love My Black Dog demands investment in a development process including a workshop and a reading. The other five entries will benefit from an intensive dramaturgical process undertaken by the writer with a nominated director or dramaturg, to take the script to a further-draft stage.

Thematically, the six works are drawn together by the concerns of family, mortality and chaos. The point of view of the child is often invoked, with an ambient sadness that seems to pervade the writers’ worlds. Overall, the works allude to the fragility of the contemporary world without speaking directly to it. They are all the more powerful for taking this approach.

The winners

Dispatch

Penelope Bartlau ($4000)
Writing a puppet-play is a complex task. It requires a subtle attention to visual detail without breaking one’s dramatic stride. That this writer is a long way to achieving this is no mean feat, and coupling this form together with the material of child mortality makes it no less difficult. However, the sense that the content and form are apt bedfellows strikes the reader from the first page. The funding will assist the project in its maturation from a penultimate draft to a script ready for production. 

Big Noise

Aidan Fennessy  ($4000)
This is already quite an accomplished work for a first draft, but it does require a detailed lacquering to bind the elements together so that it is greater than the sum of its parts. The writer’s project is to privilege character before narrative and this has been partly achieved, although it is structurally too cogent to make the experiment a success – yet. Dealing in the very ordinary world of very ordinary people, the material promises to lift off in a further drafting stage. It is not yet ready for a reading, and the funds are for the writer to work in detail on the script with his experienced team.

A Black Joy

Declan Greene ($5000)
This is anarchy: stupid-smart, brilliant writing about a world eating itself from the inside out. Sometimes absurd, but mostly disturbingly familiar, half-made, decadent characters disinter themselves across the pages of A Black Joy. It’s not pretty but it is hilarious. Imagine The Simpsons in a blender with The Addams Family with a stick of LSD thrown in and you get the picture. Do not fund this work!

Love My Black Dog

Tom Holloway ($8500)
This is, at times, an astonishing work. It deals with the black dog of depression ruining a rural, nuclear family. The internal emotional landscapes of family members are articulate, passionate and loving but by the time they manifest in familial interaction, they have become a dried-up, arid earth, a bushfire waiting for a match. The highly original performance structure, combined with a sustained poetic language that is rooted in the everyday, requires the reader to apply full concentration to their task. The rewards are manifold. It is a beautiful script that needs a final dramaturgical process to allow the writer to hear the words out loud so the musicality of the poetic score can be maximised.

Topsy

Kit Lazaroo ($3500)
Claustrophobic, cloying, deeply disturbing, Topsy tells the story of a public execution 100 years ago in New York. In its own elliptical way, it conjures references to the contemporary media spectacle of online executions and free-to-air news reportage of torture and kidnap. The atmosphere of carnival and peepshow complement this dramatic context so the material acts as a mirror to our own souls, and finds them lacking. The writer and director are a well-established team with a history of developing appropriate dramaturgical processes for each play-script and this funding is to assist them in applying this approach to this work.

The Children’s Bach

Glenn  Perry ($5000)
Adapted from the novel of the same name by Helen Garner, this libretto by Glen Perry is ripe for a detailed dramaturgical process. It is the story of a family whose world seems in a constant state of chaos, racked by dysfunctional characters whose flaws wreak havoc on each other with a selfish but always human intent. In this strange world, despair’s constant companion is hope. The material is rendered with care and attention to detail but is some way from finding a balance between the many elements that make for a successful libretto. Whilst the workshopping of songs with a musical director and singers is not the ambit of this award, we are able to support a further stage of work by the writer, the dramaturg and director, which is what the present draft requires.

About the winners

	Penelope Bartlau Penelope Bartlau is an actor, writer and puppeteer who has worked in theatre, film and television for 20 years. Most recently, she developed and worked on Windows, which premiered at the Prague Quadrennial '07, and Hatch, which toured India with Australian company Barking Spider Visual Theatre. Penelope finished a postgraduate diploma in puppetry in 2006 at the Victorian College of the Arts and is now working on her Masters in puppetry. She studied screenwriting at RMIT and was a committee member for Screenplay for three years. Penelope trained at the Lee Strasberg Institute in New York and at Commedia Dell'Arte with Antonio Fava in Italy.
	Aidan Fennessy Aidan Fennessy is a director, writer and actor. He studied language, literature and drama at Victoria College Rusden and was a co-founder of Chameleon Theatre. His plays have been produced by Playbox, the Queensland Theatre Company, Griffin Theatre in Sydney and the Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC). In 1997 he won the Wal Cherry Award for Play of the Year for Chilling and Killing My Annabel Lee. He has also directed for the MTC, Griffin Theatre, HotHouse Theatre and Playbox. He directed the short film Mr Wasinski’s Song, which won Best Australian Short Film at the Melbourne International Film Festival. He is currently Artistic Director at The Store Room Theatre Workshop.
	Declan Greene Declan Greene is a 22-year-old writer based in Melbourne. Plays to his credit include Bog (MUST, Theatreworks, 2005); Laugh Out Loud (first prize, Monash University National Playwrights Competition 2005); and the commissioned work Rageboy (Union House Theatre, 2006, and CUB Malthouse, 2007 Midsumma Festival). Declan's queer DIY production company Sisters Grimm (run with co-writer Ash Flanders) staged its debut production Fat Camp at the Mechanics Institute in 2006, followed in 2007 by Mommie & the Minister (at La Mama) and the ‘noise pollution’ trash musical Bumtown.
	Tom Holloway Tom Holloway studied in 2006 at the Royal Court Theatre’s Invitational Writer’s Program and his play The Bus aired on ABC Radio National. In 2007 Beyond the Neck, inspired by interviews with those affected by the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, was one of 10 plays chosen to be part of the Royal Court Theatre’s International Young Playwright¹s Festival in London. With the support of the Australia Council for the Arts, the play will be produced in Tasmania in September 2007. Also in 2007, Tom has been one of four male artists involved in developing Only the Lonely, a cabaret supported by Arts Victoria, which addresses male suicide in Australia and which was a major inspiration for Love My Black Dog.
	Kit Lazaroo Kit Lazaroo has written for the theatre and screen as well as short fiction. Her plays Hospital of the Lost Coin and Vanishing Box were both nominated for Most Outstanding Writing in the Fringe/Independent Theatre category for the 2002 Green Room Awards. True Adventures of a Soul Lost at Sea received an RE Ross Trust Playwrights' Script Development Award in 2003 and was nominated Most Outstanding Writing in the Fringe/Independent Theatre category for the 2004 Green Room Awards. Letters from Animals was shortlisted for the 2004 Max Afford Playwrights Competition, and Asylum won the 2005 Wal Cherry Award.
	Glenn Perry Glenn Perry has written libretti, plays and adaptations for the theatre. The libretti Fresh Ghosts and The Possessed were both written for composer Julian Yu and directed by Douglas Horton (Chambermade Opera). Other works include Backyard Galaxy (NIDA New Works), Flowers and Chocolates (Junction Theatre Co, SA), Hyper (Port Youth Theatre), The Master and the Margarita, adapted from the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov (Five Dollar Theatre Co), and Second Childhood, adapted from Morris Gleitzman’s novel (Melbourne Theatre Company/Hothouse Theatre). Glenn recently completed a libretto, with assistance from the Theatre Board of the Australia Council, based on Tim Winton’s novel That Eye the Sky, also written for Julian Yu and Chambermade Opera.