The RE Ross Trust Playwrights' Script Development Awards: Winners 2008

The 2008 Awards were judged by Tom Healey (Convenor), Patricia Cornelius and Alison Croggan.

Judges’ report

Of almost 40 entries, four scripts have been selected for further development. Between them, the playwrights cover an enormous spectrum; from the fantastic and poetic soul of Barry Dickins to the sparse, contemporary rhythms of Carly Nugent; from Lally Katz’s spiky and neurotic landscape to Angela Betzien’s poetic dreaming of 200 years of colonial Australian history-as-opera.

It was a great pleasure to be on the panel this year. So many really strong entries, so much being reached for and achieved. It is our profound hope that many of these wonderful works find homes - artists and producers who are willing to take a risk on developing and performing them. Theatre companies take note; there’s more where these came from.

This year a new award - an initiative of The RE Ross Trust Playwrights Script Development Awards, PlayWriting Australia and The RE Ross Trust - has been created. One of the 2008 winners has been invited to feature in the Showcase season of Australia’s best new plays at PlayWriting Australia’s National Play Festival 2009 in Tasmania. At this event, it will be performed as a polished stage reading by some of the country’s finest actors and presented to an audience of leading producers and theatre companies. In 2008 this has been won by Lally Katz's Return to Earth.

The winners

Return to Earth

Lally Katz

Return to Earth is the latest collaboration between Lally Katz and Arena Theatre’s Artistic Director, Chris Kohn. Their artistic partnership has dominated Melbourne’s independent theatre scene over the last few years with works including The Black Swan of Trespass and The Eisteddford touring nationally and internationally. This draft is already taut and elegant and promises to be a provocative and powerful piece of theatre for young people. '...[it] is a story about family and expectation. It is about the quest to become the person we know we should be, and the inevitable collapse of that fantasy, from which - hopefully - we emerge as a solid version of who we actually are.'

Whiteley’s Incredible Blue

Barry Dickins

Whiteley’s Incredible Blue is a solo portrait of one brilliant and eccentric Australian artist by another. A mosaic of the inside of Brett Whiteley’s head, a musing on the genesis and function of art, this is a contemplative and extraordinary abstraction for solo performer and contemporary jazz ensemble. The writing is vintage Dickins - ‘wild, transgressive and poetic’ - and the result is as dizzying, beautiful and occasionally bewildering as its muse. 'I decided my last evening was more than I could stand. So I sat.'

Shots

Carly Nugent

On 18 June 2007 Christopher Wayne Hudson shot three people in Melbourne’s CBD. This was a major case which continues to reverberate due to its seeming random nature; it might have been any of us. Shots is an intriguing meditation on this case from two points of view: an imagined persona of the shooter and a passer-by. The text is sparse, poetic and boldly imagined. An unusual take on a fascinating theme.

The Orphanage Opera

Angela Betzien

The Orphanage Project is a pre-existing text by Angela Betzien. Following a reading of this text, Betzien invited director Suzanne Chaundy and composer Jethro Woodward to co-adapt it as an opera. It is a dream-like text set around an orphanage between 1820 and 2007. It is ideally suited to opera as a form with its transcendent thematic material and open theatrical structure. The proposal includes an allocation for adaptation of the text as well as a workshop designed to test the conceptual ideas of the creative team.

About the winners

	Angela Betzien Angela Betzien is a multi-award-winning writer who is currently completing an MA in playwriting. Her plays include Dog Wins Lotto (1997), Playboy of the Working Class (2001), The Kingswood Kids (2002), Princess of Suburbia (2001), Children of the Black Skirt (2003), Hoods (2006), Motel (2007) and Girl who Cried Wolf (2008). Her awards include the Queensland Theatre Company (QTC)/Comalco Young Playwrights award in 1994, 1995 and 1996, and an AWGIE for Theatre for Young Audience as well as the inaugural Richard Wherrett Prize for Excellence in Playwriting for Hoods.
	Barry Dickins Barry Dickins has been an English and Art teacher at secondary state schools. Since the late 1960s he has worked as a playwright and actor at La Mama Theatre, Pram Factory, MTC, Playbox and many other major Australian theatre companies. Dickins' play Remember Ronald Ryan won the Premiers Literary Award for Drama in 1994 and the Amnesty International Award for Peace through Art. He has written several books of interviews including Ordinary Heroes: Personal Recollections of Australians at War, published by Hardie Grant in 1999. He narrated this as a talking book for the ABC. His book Black + Whiteley: Barry Dickens in Search of Brett was published by Hardie Grant in 2002.
	Lally Katz Lally Katz is a core member of Stuck Pigs Squealing Theatre Company, for which she has written The Black Swan of Trespass, The Eisteddfod and Lally Katz and the Terrible Mysteries of the Volcano. These works toured extensively, winning several awards. Other works include Criminology (co-written with Tom Wright, for Arena Theatre Company and Malthouse Theatre), Goodbye New York, Goodbye Heart (premiered in New York), and Waikiki Palace and Hip Hip Hooray (premiered in Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf2loud program). She’s currently writing commissions for Malthouse Theatre, Belvoir Street and Sydney Theatre Company. Lally was a delegate of World Interplay in 2003.
	Carly Beth Nugent Carly Beth Nugent’s first full length play Safe House, performed at the University of Melbourne in 2005, earned her the Union House Theatre Scriptwriting Award. The award, granted in the form of a writing mentorship, resulted in a working relationship with playwright Tee O’Neill. In 2007 Carly’s play Casper Dies was produced by Express Post Productions for Mudfest at the University of Melbourne. In the same year Carly was invited to attend World Interplay - an international conference for young playwrights held biannually in Townsville. Her play Mummy was performed at the Malthouse Theatre as part of 3D Fest, and her short play Neighbours premiered at Sydney’s 2008 Short and Sweet Festival. Carly is currently working as an English teacher in South Korea, but plans to return to Melbourne early in 2009.