7-ON PLAYWRIGHTS

The White Divers of Broome

2012-01-14T22:20:00.001+11:00

Produced by Black Swan State Theatre Company and Perth International Arts Festival, Hilary's 'The White Divers of Broome' opens on Feb 1st.
Have a peek behind the scenes here.
And there's an interview on The Australian Online.

In the boom times of 1912 Broome, Sydney Pigott is a wealthy pearling master looking for a way around the White Australia Policy, anxious to keep his cheap Asian workers – and his high profits.

Webber, Sanders and Beasily are the cream of the British Navy deep sea divers. Hired by Pigott, they arrive in Broome naïvely convinced they’ll prove their skills when they hit the hazardous seas and collect the precious mother-of-pearl. But desperate Asian crews, shadowy alliances and the ruthless environment of Broome are against the white divers from the beginning.

From the brothels to the ballrooms to the deep seas, it’s a cutthroat world and trust is hard to find.

Inspired by the book of the same name by John Bailey, The White Divers of Broome is a celebration of boom time Broome and its exotic clash of cultures. Be captivated by a stirring account of greed, betrayal, loyalty and survival that resonates through the years.

“Hilary Bell will sweep you along in this epic and heartbreaking story, and take you back to a time when the racial and class relations in the exotic frontier town of Broome were watched by the entire country.”Kate Cherry

WORLD PREMIERE

The White Divers of Broome was commissioned by Black Swan State Theatre Company as part of the Rio Tinto Black Swan Commissions.

By Hilary Bell. Inspired by The White Divers of Broome by John Bailey.

Cast Includes: Caitlin Beresford-Ord, Nick Candy, Adriane Daff, Kylie Farmer [Kaarljilba Kaardn], Michelle Fornasier, Stuart Halusz, Sean Hawkins, Yutaka Izumihara, Miyuki Lotz, Greg McNeill, Kenneth Moraleda, Jo Morris, Tom O’Sullivan, Ian Toyne

Director: Kate Cherry

Designers: Set Designer Bruce McKinven, Costume Designer Alicia Clements, Lighting Designer Trent Suidgeest, Sound Designer Ben Collins, Movement Director Claudia Alessi, Assistant Director Damon Lockwood

28 January – 16 February 2012Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre of WA

Why the arts matter

2012-01-07T17:54:00.003+11:00

Get 2012 off with a bang (if you haven't already) with this thoughtful and cogent article by British playwright David Edgar that traces trends and government policies and thinking about the arts over the last couple of decades or thereabouts. He explores why the arts matter to society and—very important in these times of GFC and resultant cut-backs—why society should fund the arts.

Read it here.

7-ON's Plays Reviewed

2011-11-25T08:40:00.003+11:00

Read reviews of 7-ON's work in a collection of 100 Australian Plays at Australianplays.org.

I Contain Multitudes—post show

2011-11-13T12:48:00.001+11:00

Here's Cath, Vanessa and Donna with our fabulous director and producer Gus Supple—all looking pretty happy—after the second and final performance of I CONTAIN MULTITUDES at The Old 505 Theatre on 12 November.

And here are our actors with Gus (on the far right of the photo). From the back and left to right the actors are: Matt Charleston (A Child into the World by Catherine Zimdahl), Melinda Dransfield (A Cleansing Force by Donna Abela), Felix Jozeps (Narcissus by Hilary Bell), Stephen Wilkinson (iSpiderman by Noëlle Janaczewska), Jennifer White (Sex-Ed by Ned Manning), Madeleine Jones (The World's Tiniest Monkey by Vanessa Bates) and Josipa Draisma (Ariadne by Verity Laughton).

They're not in the photos, but thanks also to composer Michael Imielski, stage manager Oliver Rynn and the wonderful NovemberISM playwrights (Tamara Asmar, Kit Brookman, Rebecca Clarke, Tahli Corin, Joanna Erskine & Rick Viede) for the opportunity to do I CONTAIN MULTITUDES.

I Contain Multitudes

2011-10-18T11:06:00.002+11:00

7-ON’s contribution to the NovemberISM event
organised and curated by
the dynamic Sydney-based writers’ collective ISM
is
I CONTAIN MULTITUDES

Friday 11 and Saturday 12 November at 9:00 pm

At The Old 505 Theatre, 342 Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills 

(A short walk from Central Station)

Maria van Oosterwijk, 1669

I CONTAIN MULTITUDES

7 short monologues, one apiece from the members of 7-ON

Directed by Augusta Supple

The Blake Poetry Prize

2011-09-16T15:30:00.000+10:00

Just for something completely different. Verity's poem, The Fox Man, was one of two highly commended entries in this year's Blake Poetry Prize, announced on September 15th. The winning poem was Robert Adamson's beautiful offering, Via Negativa, The Divine Dark and the other Highly Commended entry was Fieldwork, by Todd Turner.

'Memmie' in Melbourne

2011-09-13T12:32:00.001+10:00

Hilary's 'Memmie Le Blanc' is currently enjoying a second production in Melbourne, directed by Tom Gutteridge for the Union House Theatre. Hilary was interviewed by Briony Kidd for Australian Plays.org on the process of writing the play. Have a read.

Noëlle in Newcastle

2011-08-19T14:23:00.002+10:00

Mostly I’m deep in thistles, chasing themes through archives. But I was in Newcastle for 3 weeks in May/June this year, thanks to a residency at the Lock-Up Cultural Centre. Dark and stormy nights alone in the old jail had their challenges, but that aside, I had a great time, a creatively productive time. I walked miles with my camera and notebook—and totally fell in love with Newcastle. I’m a sucker for port cities and those industrial powerhouses of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries now doing the hard slog to reinvent themselves.

Newcastle, June 2011

I was in Newcastle to work on a jazz-infused collection of poems, monologues and short pieces about language in a digital age called Hello the Fine Stranger.

And—as is often the case with residencies—I got the idea for, and began, a new project: Newcastle Florilegium. It’s too early to say exactly what form/s this work might take, but it involves the city’s weeds and what I’m calling ‘folkscience.’

Some Newcastle weeds

As part of the residency I ran a workshop on writing the monologue for the Hunter Writers’ Centre, and, piggy-backing on the truly fantastic (in every sense of that word) exhibition Happily Ever After, I did an in-progress presentation of my 50-minute monologue/performance essay Good With Maps at the Lock-Up.

Women Playwrights' Solutions Roundtable

2011-08-15T10:51:00.000+10:00

While Hilary was sorting the World's Best Photograph (we are all jealous!) and Ned was Blitzing 'em at Byron, Cath and Verity were engaged in the Women Playwrights' Solutions Roundtable, held on August 12 at the kindly-donated Richard Wherrett Room at the Sydney Theatre. It was a fierce, strong, passionate day with 30 fierce, strong passionate people, about half of them women playwrights from all around the country representing the rest of their constituency with flair, articulate intelligence and the occasional hard stare.

We are hopeful that the conversation begun on Friday, particularly the on-the-ground one between activist playwrights, will in time translate to concrete initiatives. (These are being steered at this stage through the AWOL group of women playwrights - if you want to be a part of it talk to almost any female playwright in town and she'll be able to direct you to them).

In the meantime, the very fact of having the conversation at all, with the goodwill and effort involved on the part of all present, playwrights, company reps and observers alike feels like a step forward.

Look at me!

2011-08-12T23:05:00.001+10:00

HILARY SAYS: Here is my new headshot. I think it's the best one I've ever had, to be honest. And it's the kind I can keep using indefinitely, there'll be no worrying about how I'm still using that old photo from twenty-five years ago.

Apart from being relieved to have finally had a good photo taken, I'm ready to talk about a play I've been working on for several years which is about to come to life on stage: 'The White Divers of Broome'.

Commissioned by Black Swan State Theatre Company in Western Australia, it's inspired by an incident that occurred in 1912. The White Australia Policy had bleached the country, all except for one remaining pocket of 'coloured' labour: the pearling industry in Broome. The Government demanded that a group of English divers be brought out to replace the mostly Asian workers. But this posed a huge threat to the pearling masters: white men meant higher wages, better rations, medical insurance, the threat of union action - and accountable deaths. When an Asian diver died, as did 10% every season, "they just hose out the suit and put another bloke in it", no questions asked. The Englishmen's arrival also threatened the Asian workers, who had come from impoverished villages to make a living here. If the White Experiment succeeded, they'd be deported.

If you want to know what happens next, you'll have to see the play (or read John Bailey's excellent historical account, 'The White Divers of Broome'): but suffice to say there is a circling of the wagons and a realignment of allegiances, resulting in some very unlikely bedfellows, as Broome unites to expel the unwitting invaders.

Watch this space for information on the upcoming production...

Brain Food in Byron Bay

2011-08-12T20:20:00.000+10:00

I have just spent five glorious, stimulating days at the Byron Bay Writers Festival. It was so stimulating it's taken me a week to get over it. I began with a Playwrighting Workshop where the oldest participant was in her 80's and the youngest hadn't quite made it home from Splendour. Having spent a lifetime teaching kids Playwrighting this workshop was quite a revelation. For a start no-one looked at me with bored seen-it-all teenage eyes. What struck me was how much fun writing plays can be. How much freedom it gives the writer. I encouraged them to write a short play and send it to one of the many short play festivals.
Next stop was a panel for about 200 schoolkids. I was the Chairman (person). I quite like the sound of "Chairman Ned" but no-one used it. The panelists were Joanna Murray Smith, Louis Nowra and Cory Taylor. The first two are well known Playwrights and Cory has just had a book published. We discussed the nature of writing for Page, Stage and Screen. It was pretty scary for me as I'd never been a Chair before and I had really smart people on my panel. And I had to keep the discussion moving along and pretend I knew what they were all talking about. It was going pretty well until rows of kids started leaving at regular intervals. We'd were in the middle of passionately debating the virtues of particular writing forms when a row of kids upped and offed. And then another. And another. Talk about losing your audience. Then it clicked. We had the 1.30pm - 2.15pm. Bus time. Great. We struggled on and I'm sure the kids who remained found it interesting.
My next Chairing experience was way more successful. I was so paranoid about the Schools one I sat up all night preparing questions and clever things to say about my panel. We were discussing "The Word in Physical Space". We were in a Big Tent and there were hundreds of people there. If I said I was nervous I wouldn't be lying. Bunches of kids walking out to get buses was one thing. Hundreds of adults walking out because they were bored shitless was quite another. I needn't have worried. Joanna (again) and Louis (again) were joined by Brendan Cowell. Quite a combo. Brendan had the audience in the palm of his hand and sparks (good ones) flew. It was stimulating and informative at the same time. Everyone seemed to enjoy it. It was quite a coup to make that topic fun and even funny.
My final panel was Joanna (again - a hat trick) David Williamson and Greg Haddrick (Underbelly and Cloudstreet). "Portraying Passion on Stage and Screen"was the topic. And I had the mother of all hangovers having enjoyed Paul Kelly's concert way too much. But...it was awesome. It kicked arse. And I was the most relieved Chairman on the planet.
What struck me about the whole experience was just how interested people are in writing for the theatre. And how interested people are in writing in general. And how many incredible minds there are out there. And in these odd, rather dark times there is hope that these voices will be heard.
Ned

Over the backyard fence and onto the world stage

2011-07-08T12:53:00.001+10:00

Last month Sydney playwright Tim Daley wrote great piece in The Sydney Morning Herald, about the need to look beyond our own backyard and get work onto the world stage. As a country we import a lot of overseas theatre, scripts as well as productions. But at the moment it's something of a one-way street. Isn't it time, he asks, we got that traffic moving in both directions?

You can read his article here.

The Playwrights' Muster at Griffin Theatre Company

2011-06-13T15:10:00.008+10:00

Last Monday night – 6^th June - 7-ON gave a (sort of a) keynote speech for the recent Playwrights’ Muster held at Griffin Theatre in Nimrod Street. Vanessa and Verity officiated and Hilary rang some invaluable bells (hijacked from Vanessa’s four year old son’s stash, in fact. Thank you, Tristan!). We promised we’d make (most of!) the text available on the blogsite for anyone who might be interested to check it out. So…here it is!

…7-ON has been asked to give a bit of a run down on the past year of playwriting in Australia.

We thought we’d do it via the 7 Deadly Playwriting sins. Obviously not all of 7ON are here and probably that’s quite lucky because we can get a bit rowdy and also seven writers means seven different opinions and that’s 49 takes on the 7 deadly sins and that’s a long night.

We all took a sin. We all wrote something in response.

We don’t pretend to know the answer to the questions that came up over the year. Instead, we invite you to reflect on these and chat further wherever you see fit.

SIN THE FIRST: GLUTTONY

That’s it. The food thing – all the chocs you eat while you write – addictions to the little canapés at opening nights, free asparagus on toast, baby meringues – or, or….any time any of us may possibly have over-indulged in a substance that may have led to a degree of dis-inhibition … … exuberance, for example… at any or indeed every… Playwriting Australia Conference? Or - indeed - Facebooking while drunk. All valid examples of playwrights and gluttonous behaviour. Here’s what the first 7ON sinner had to say:

“Gluttony is an interesting proposition for a playwright in Australia, since we are the lowest paid of all the performance writers. Write 15 minutes of children’s TV, you get $4,000: write 15 minutes for the stage you might get a well-scrounged $500. But more likely you’ll get a couple of comps and a carrot stick dipped in hummus. So the idea of a playwright having the money to gorge on anything is…quaint. Figuratively, of course, gorging on self doubt or paranoia or isolation are obvious sins. But in a lot of the debates that have raged this year, I’m sadly aware of a systemic sin – ‘midcareer’ comrades who feel chewed up and spat out and deemed no longer edible.

Meaning, in some real sense, our theatre community seems to have had its fill of writers who are quite probably in their prime. Why? Faddishmess? Lack of imagination? Perceived conservatism and aesthetic dullness of anyone over 35? The impossibility of being the Next Big Thing twice? Who knows? I mean when Caryl Churchill writes something new, the world rejoices. She’s 73.

Is there a Churchill among us? We may never know. Playwrights decades younger than Churchill…are walking away- into the grateful arms of TV, poetry and academia. Why? To keep their joy. To not let it be devoured and spat out by the gluttonous beast of prevailing appetites and tastes. We sacrifice a lot to do what we do, but we must never sacrifice our joy. Which might mean knowing when to take your talent and training and expertise and insight elsewhere.”

So. Question: How many Australian playwrights are now finding their joy elsewhere?

SIN THE SECOND: SLOTH

Wikipedia defines SLOTH thus: Spiritual or emotional apathy, neglecting what God has spoken, and being physically and emotionally inactive

…through inactivity, one invites the desire to sin. "For Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do." Blah blah blah…There was a whole lot more of this sort of thing but frankly we couldn’t be bothered cutting and pasting anymore. Here’s our second sinner:

Sloth may seem an obvious playwright’s sin. Plop on your ug boots, ignore your emails, heat up yesterday’s coffee in the microwave, read the papers or go to the daytime movies for “research”. Loll about in front of the computer and write some shit but first you might see what’s happening on facebook or twitter. Read someone’s blog. Have sex. With someone else. Or yourself. Or just think about it for a bit and then go and eat some chocolate.

No need for makeup, for gym membership, let’s face it - barely any need for clothes really.

And apart from the writing bit which as we all know is incredibly relaxing and really really easy, there’s the what… phone calls to theatre companies? Emails to literary managers? Smoke signals to agents?Feeble attempts to set up meetings with artistic directors?

Half baked grant applications?

There’s a fair bit of postage involved yes, unsolicited scripts, competitions, so that’ll involve a walk or drive, a monetary transaction, shoving things into slots and of course there’s Officeworks, great lollyshop of a timesuck, biro-porn, sloth haven that it is. Hum de dum de dum…

Recently Australian quarantine were made aware of two animals being smuggled into Brisbane from Singapore, two small furry animals, terrified, clinging to each other, staring out with wide eyes and wondering what happened to their Southeast Asian jungle.

They were Slow Lorises. Not a sloth as such, the Slow Loris is smaller, cuter and seemingly has a far more miserable life. They’re highly sought after as pets thanks to youtube and their general cuteness. To make them pettable, they have their teeth cut off with nail clippers. Maybe 2% survive this. Not surprisingly, they’re endangered. And the two found on the flight to Brisbane were put down because there was no documentation to say that they were perfectly healthy in the first place.

So maybe it’s better to be a sloth after all. Or even a playwright. Unlike the Slow Loris we don’t have our teeth cut off and we’re rarely smuggled in tubes on international flights. But we are cute. And sometimes slow – to get active, to get angry, to get moving.And we don’t mean to be slothful, in fact there’s only two situations where I become a sloth. One is when I’m writing – because nothing else matters. And two is when I’m depressed. Because then I feel like nothing else matters at all.

But if you want to fight the sloth fight, remember it’s not just playwrights who are guilty of ignoring their emails…

QUESTION: Are playwrights the Endangered Species of Australian literature?

SIN THE THIRD: WRATH

There’s been a fair few angry moments in the last 12 months, haven’t there? A number of questions raised in our 7-ON email-go-round anyway. Among other places.

Of course, playwrights are generally not known as being… wrathful. We’re actually quite gentle creatures. This last year however, as a species, we went birko, ballistic, postal, spakka, off our nut. We got the pip, the shits, the red rage. We were quietly indignant,

ferociously vehement, deeply hurt, and really really pissed off.

And these were some of the questions being asked:

1. Where are the women playwrights?

2. Why was there an attitude that Australian plays were not worthy of being awarded the Ministry prize in 2010?

3. Why are the main companies doing more adaptations than new plays?

4. Where are the women playwrights?

5. Is this the era of the director not the playwright, and should we all just suck it up?

6. Are we (i.e. theatre generally) losing our audience or are they (the audience) evolving?

7. Is the writer as personality/celebrity becoming at least as important as the actual play they write?

8. Where are the women playwrights?

Here’s our third sinner’s response:

The Blank Screen by…one of us.

Subjects for poems:

Avoid the royal family like the plague, same for yucky disease, but rats have possibilities, even fleas. Cats have been done by T.S Eliot. Death is reliable. Love works best when it’s lost or unrequited. Be careful with melancholy, no one likes a whinger. 'I wandered lonely as a cloud' blah, blah, blah. Age has stood the test of time. Old photos, old people, old vases. Ditto nature: autumn, tulips, the rain in Ireland. Keep found text for emergencies. Don’t try to be funny. Comedy belongs on the stage.

Subjects for plays:

Men and war. Love and murder – ideally seta against a backdrop of war. The zeitgeist in local accents. Snapshots of here and now. Juxtaposition is OK, allegory is not - unless you’re Arthur Miller. Leave poetry to Shakespeare. Important men, men at war with themselves, men with their feet on the ladder going up. A culture is remembered for the splash of its art not the durability of its sewer system. History is borderline, but war is guaranteed. No matter the drama, characters should be 34 years old.

QUESTION: What if I never get a play up again? What if that was the last production I’ll have? What if I never get a first production? What if that was my first and last production? What if?

SIN THE FOURTH: ENVY

A letter from…one of us…

I know all about playwright-envy. A few years ago I was living far away and had two babies, no family, no money, so my theatre-going activities were confined to reading reviews, often of my peers' plays. My resentment of their getting productions was only alleviated by the schadenfreude of bad notices.

When the opportunity arose to form an alliance with six other playwrights, I saw it as a chance to air grievances and rejoice in their success. And that, for me, was the impetus behind founding 7-On.

I still take the name of the Lord in vain when I get a rejection letter, I still covet other people's awards, but being part of this playwrights' company has helped me to sin less. Salvation has lain in sharing both the triumphs and the humiliations of my colleagues. Generosity is an integral part of creativity, and envy is paralysing. I'm hoping by our next forum, we will be able to speak from experience about the Eleven Virtues.

QUESTION: When the pie is so small, how can our community ensure that everyone who deserves a piece gets one?

SIN THE FIFTH: LUST.

It would be ever so easy to get the wrong idea with our next sin, to be inappropriate or untoward, to speak disparagingly of actors, to be steamy and smutty and complain about dampness of the nether regions (due to rising sea levels) and finally insist the whole thing is, to quote Tony Abbott, “crap”. But in fact we’re not here to talk about climate change.

Instead, we move onto sin number 5 which is surprisingly brief. Perhaps because playwrights know what they want, what they really really want:

Here are what we thought were the top 7 lusts for a playwright

1. A director who has an ear for language and an eye for an elegant and hard-working design. And a great manner on the floor.

2. A producer who combines hard-nosed pragmatism with a passion for art.

3. A cast who will push for clarity in rehearsal and perform with generosity right through the season.

4. A critic who will review the play in terms of the task and style it sets itself instead of the one she/he would have preferred it to.

5. An audience that gives standing ovations every night. (We did say ‘lust’!)

6. Publication, enormous sales and not to be pulped

7. A box office that surrenders rivers of gold - or at least enough to pay the bills.

And stationery. Good stationery. We’ve mentioned one third of the Bermuda Triangle For Playwrights i.e. Officeworks, the other two being of course Smiggle and any shop stocking Moleskins. Even as we put this speech together, let the records show, one of our playwrights who shall remain nameless brandished their very new, very expensive, very lust-worthy pen.

It was a yellow fountain pen with black ink.

And it was lush.

QUESTION: What more could any playwright want?

SIN THE SIXTH:

It comes before a fall, it’s a U2 song, a parade, a bunch of lions, half a Jane Austen novel.

It’s number six, it’s PRIDE

Well, listen. Maybe some sins aren’t so sinnish at all. Maybe we can have a different take on Pride. Listen to this:

“Creativity is a life blood for people. We’re not talking life blood for artists – although of course it is that – we’re talking about communities, people”. Mike Leigh.

“Artists create a vocabulary for the future." Wesley Enoch.

‘The role of the artist I now understand as that of revealing - through world-surfaces - the implicit forms of the soul’ Judith Thurman.

This is a hard gig. I think one can be justifiably proud to take it on. We’re proud of our productions and publications, we’re proud of our camaraderie and the fact we’ve stuck it out this long, we’re proud to welcome such a talented bunch into this community and to watch them grow. Like Edward Albee said, we’re proud to swim – whatever the strokes we have made or will make - in the same river as Albee himself, as Shakespeare and Churchill and the Greeks.

QUESTION: Aren’t you?

SIN THE SEVENTH: GREED

Gordon Gecko famously said Greed is Good. He was actually talking about money and everyone knows that playwrights don’t do it for the money, they do it for the glamour.

This quote was from a movie in the eighties and we also know that the eighties was quite a reasonable sort of time for a working playwright.

It should also be pointed out that geckos in general are not endangered species.

At least they didn’t seem to be in Penang, in the eighties. Honest to god the little rascals would shit on everything and the noise they’d make when they were going for it…talk about lust….

But back to greed:

Here’s a rapid response to the sin of greed :

"I'm greedy for a revival of regional theatre companies because it's my firmly held belief that one of the reasons it is so hard to get our work done is the death by a thousand cuts of regional theatre companies like the Q (now a venue), the Hunter Valley Theatre Company, Theatre South, The Riverina Trucking Company, Mainstreet Theatre, Junction Theatre, Theatre ACT and the New England Theatre Company I could go on but whoever is reading this might run out of breath and faint and provide one of you with the turning point for a new play which will then compete with my new masterpiece which i haven't yet written but might if someone funds regional theatre again..."

QUESTION: Do you really want to hurt me? Do you really want to make me cry? (Boy George, circa 1982)

We want to end with a little extra. A bonus sin if you like. When we first started talking about tonight and what we might talk about in relation to the seven deadly sins, one of us wrote this:

“On Facebook tonight, someone asked. “Why do you Write?” Why do you write?

It reminded me of the time in my life when I did decide to give up on writing. I had basically just been told that I had missed out on a place in AFTRS after a long and horrible interview, following a long and intensive application. I was living in a caravan in Wollongong. It was cold and rainy and I was devastated by this latest rejection. I decided I needed to follow my father’s advice to “GET A REAL JOB”. Writing was too hard and too soul destroying and I wasn’t cut out for it.

Anyway I wandered Wollongong CBD crying to myself and I was freezing and I decided, spur of the moment to go into a cinema and see whatever film was on. And I realised at a time when I felt really low and about to give up, that actually I needed to see and to hear…a story. I was comforted by story and character because above all else I actually am a writer no matter what, if my writing is fashionable or not, if it is performed or not, if I am successful or not.

This realisation was strangely comforting. Because I realised… I have no choice.

I am a writer I must therefore write.

And it occurred to me tonight that the greatest sin of playwriting is not wrath or envy or lust or gluttony or sloth or pride or greed but despair. Giving up on your species. Giving up on the whole idea of Australian playwriting. Australian storytelling. . Not just individually as playwrights but collectively as an industry.

As playwrights we wrestle with all the sins all the time but this last one, the defeat of hope, the triumph of despair is probably the biggest of them all.

And it’s not just the writers who suffer from it, time and again we hear others in our tribe, the other theatre makers, indicate that basically they have given up. On us. For whatever reason they like to give, they make us believe that our stories are not worthy of being told.That’s not everyone, of course. But enough to make us feel gluttonous and angry and greedy and envious and lustful and slothful and proud.

It feels bad sometimes. Being a playwright. It feels fucking terrible sometimes. And every now and then it feels sublime. No matter what,we write. Because we have to. Because we’re writers.

So if you are a playwright, don’t give up. Fight for that joy, find the places where your voice will be heard, where your stories can be told. They’re there. Somewhere.

And if you’re everyone else, don’t give up on us.

No questions.

END

Sensorium: solo exhibition of new paintings by Catherine Zimdahl

2011-06-05T15:55:00.000+10:00

Viewing Hours from 11am - 4pm, June 7-13 at Chrissie Cotter Gallery. Address: Pidcock Street, Camperdown. CCG is a gallery space provided by Marrickville Council that encourages innovative and contemporary forms of art and cultural expression.

Sonic Tales at 89.7 Eastside FM

2011-05-26T13:19:00.004+10:00

Noëlle and Donna have had a lovely time working with community radio station Eastside FM who decided this year to do something a little different. Under the moniker of Sonic Tales, and driven by producer Gill Falson, the station has done a stirling job on their radio plays "It's Your Funeral" directed by Susie Lindeman, and "A Walk In The Park" directed by Vanessa Hughes. The short but beautifully produced plays hit the airwaves on 23 of May, and will feature on different arts programs over the next month. They are part of the first batch to go to air, so more radio drama listening will be on offer in the months to come.

Stephen Sondheim's new book

2011-05-01T21:45:00.000+10:00

HILARY SAYS...
I have been a stone Sondheim fan since I was fifteen years old. In my opinion, there isn't a lyricist who can touch him. I'm reading his book on music-theatre lyrics, 'Finishing The Hat', which I would recommend to anyone who is excited by the technical aspects of the craft, especially as interrogated by someone as rigorous and funny and honest as Stephen Sondheim. The pages on the various kinds of rhyme alone thrill the heart! And because 7-On is a playwrights' company, I wanted to extract this relevant quote. High praise indeed for playwrights, coming from him...

"Some songs, of course, are small scenes in themselves. I've been asked many times why I don't write the books for my own musicals, since I treat lyrics as short plays whenever I can. They key word in that sentence is "short." I'm by nature a playwright, but without the necessary basic skill: the ability to tell a story that holds an audience's attention for more than a few minutes. Writing plays is, in my view, the most difficult of the literary arts. A play has to be as packed and formally controlled as a sonnet, but roomy enough to let the actors and the stagecraft in. Packed but loose, like a good lyric. Poets rarely have to deal with plot; novelists never have to deal with actors. A playwright has to deal with both and still make the result immediate enough to grip an audience for, on the average, two and a half hours. (That usually includes an intermission, where he loses them for fifteen minutes and has to woo them back.) I like to think I can hold their interest with short forms: playlets which are called songs. The longest I've written is the opening number of Into The Woods, a mere twelve-minute sequence, and that includes a good deal of dialogue. I'm in awe of good playwrights, even when I don't like the plays, and ever since the day I started working with my first professional collaborator and learned what went into the craft of playwriting, I have never tried to do it alone."

Stephen Sondheim,

From 'Finishing The Hat'.

Old Texts Revisited

2011-05-01T18:46:00.000+10:00

Airplay, on ABC Radio National, has just completed broadcasting a season of radio plays under the title Old Texts Revisited. Four of the six pieces were written by 7oners, and if you're quick, you can still hear one or two or them on line. The plays are:

The Fox by Catherine

Beautiful Hands by Hilary

Random Red by Noëlle

Aurora's Lament by Donna

Women Playwrights Overview

2011-01-24T13:43:00.000+11:00

7-ON’s Take on ‘The Women Playwrights Thing’

Statistics.

1. People who follow this blog may remember that 7-ON did a rough survey of the percentage of women writers in the seasons of the four major Sydney companies in 2011 – 5 out of 41 plays (as opposed to e.g. dance works as part of a theatre season). That is, 12%. (We should point out these are indeed rough figures – that’s why we’d welcome proper statistics.)

http://sevenon.blogspot.com/

2. Jane Howard in her blog in Adelaide did a much more comprehensive overhaul of the productions of the Major Performing Arts Group in 2011. Her results are detailed but – an overview – of the 80 out of 88 scheduled plays that have credited writers, a female writer is credited with just 13, or 16% of texts. Of new works, 29% have a credited female writer.

http://noplain.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/if-you%E2%80%99re-not-shakespeare-it%E2%80%99s-good-to-be-brecht-or-lally-katz/

3. These figures are part of an international trend - in the UK the figure is 17% - the percentage of women playwrights being produced and also the pay gap between men and women. This is in context of a nation where 52% of the population is female and 65% of the theatre audience is female

http://17percent.co.uk

4. In the US in the last decade 11% of plays produced on Broadway were by women. (But these plays did 18% better at the box office – the reason being perhaps that 60% of the ticket buyers for Broadway shows are women.) In 2009 statistics compiled by (writer) Julia Jordan demonstrate that shoes by women at major New York nonprofits for that season were 12.6 percent of the total.

http://womenandhollywood.com/2009/06/30/gender-bias-in-theatre-digging-a-little-deeper/

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=an.EDXm2gS_0

5. Europe. Statistics are a little harder to come by but, for example, in Germany, perhaps the leading nation for theatre in Europe, the major theatre company, the Schaubühne, has a stable of 32 playwrights, living and dead. Of these 3 (Helene Cixioux, Sarah Kane, Yael Ronan) are women.

http://www.schaubuehne.de/en_EN/ensemble/authors

In other words, this is not just a national but an international trend. What is going on?

To the point:

We don’t actually have to argue our case – the statistics speak for themselves. Of the limited opportunities for production of new work by Australian playwrights the lion’s share goes to male playwrights.

Responses to recent publicity about this issue have been uneasy to say the least. One comment was that the issue in relation to Australian playwriting is one of quality, not equality. Given the statistics, what this is actually saying is that the work by female playwrights is about (at most) 29% as good as the work of those male playwrights who are getting produced (however good or not those male writers are perceived to be). We have seen a lot of that produced work and we have read a lot of that unproduced work, and we don’t agree.

Someone also mentioned the word ‘entitlement.’ As far as 7-ON is aware most women playwrights feel no sense of entitlement that their plays should be produced just because they write them (or, at any rate, not more than any male playwrights do) but they do feel a sense of entitlement that they should have an equal opportunity for such plays to be both considered for production and actually produced. The statistics indicate that clearly they are not.

Another response concerned the notion that quotas – which were mentioned by some writers in the SMH article – are the equivalent of ‘social engineering.’ What was giving women the vote then?

We are prepared to assert that in the same way that the decision-makers in the major companies were/are hiring – or not – female directors – they are also simply commissioning and producing according to taste, personal networks and individual ideals and aspirations. We can see that this might be understandable, if regrettable, in terms of the (male) canon and box office pressures. It is not in terms of current new work.

We’d also like to point out that if it is legitimate to address the problems of women directors then it is legitimate to address the problems of women playwrights.

We simply want fair representation – that is to say – justice.

We feel that at the very least there does need to be some sort of structural or systemic adjustment made to give sight to those blinded by their own privilege. And some sort of formal accounting back to the funding bodies – a system of checks and balances - might a very good start.

And we also feel long-lasting policy decisions need to be discussed and then taken so that there is no chance that the equal justice both male and female members of the industry have taken for granted over the past years can be a real as opposed to an illusory one.

Two members of 7-ON, Catherine Zimdahl and Verity Laughton, met recently with Lyn Wallis, the Director of the Theatre Board and Program Manager, Antonietta Morgillo. We raised these issues with them. We feel that the OzCo can help women playwrights by collecting, collating and making available documentation and analysis of gender equity in Australian theatre companies; can assist in devising checks and balances for gender equality; and can help plan for a model of a future Australian theatre industry where both men and women’s voices are given equal weight. We are hopeful that this in fact will prove to be the case.

BREAKDOWN OF MALE/FEMALE PLAYWRIGHTS IN 2010 and 2011 SEASONS in AUSTRALIA (an edited version of documentation collected by the Australian Women playwrights On Line (AWOL) group of Australian women playwrights)

STC 2011
12 plays in all
1 by a woman – 0 Australian women
11 by men – 5 Australian men (written or adapted)

STC 2010
12 plays in all
1 by a woman – 1 by Australian woman
1 adaptation by a woman
10 by men

MTC 2011
16 plays in all
4 by women – 2 by Australian women
12 by men – 6 plays by Australian men

MTC 2010
12 plays in all
3 by women – 2 by Australian women
9 by men – 4 by Australian men

Belvoir 2011
13 plays in all
3 by women (with 1 being a choreographer) – 2 by Australian women playwrights
10 by men – 5 by Australian men playwrights

Belvoir 2010
7 plays in all
2 by women – 0 Australian women
5 by men – 2 Australian men

Belvoir Downstairs for August to December 2010

4 plays in all

3 plays by men, 1 play by woman (Australian)

Griffin Theatre company (new Australian works) – 2011
4 plays in all
1 play by a woman – 1 Australian woman
3 plays by men – 3 Australian men

(2011 Griffin Independent – 4 plays – one by a woman)

Griffin Theatre company (new Australian works) - 2010
4 plays in all
0 plays by women – 0 Australian women
4 plays by men – 4 Australian men

(Note that there were also 3 short plays – of which one out of three was a woman)

Queensland Theatre Company 2011

12 plays in all
0 plays by women – 0 plays by Australian women
12 plays by men – 4 by Australian men

Queensland Theatre Company 2010
9 plays in all
2 plays by women (1 an adaptation/co-writing credit) – 0 plays by Australian women
7 plays be men - 2 by Australian men

Black Swan Theatre Company – Perth – 2011

7 plays in all
1 play by woman – 1 by Australian woman
6 plays by men – 4 by Australian men

Black Swan Theatre Company – Perth – 2010

6 plays in all

2 plays by women – 1 by Australian woman

4 plays by men – 1 by Australian man

State Theatre Company of SA 2011 Season

7 plays - 0 by women.

State Theatre Company of SA 2010 Season

Eight plays in all

7 by men (4 Australian)

2 by women (1 Australian) (includes co-writing credits)

Malthouse Theatre 2011 Season 1
(Note that most works in the season are not text-based works)
10 works in all
2 text-based works – both Australian women,

2 works choreographed by women
6 other works written or choreographed by men

Malthouse 2010 Season 1
7 works in all – one (co-written by 1 woman and 2 men)
3 by women – 3 Australian women
4 by men
1 by Chunky Move Company – collaboration

Malthouse Theatre 2010 Season 2
9 works in all
5 by women
4 by men

Riverside Theatre Parramatta 2011 season
11 plays in all (plus a few operas)

5 by women, 3 by Australian women

6 by men – 4 by Australian men

ALSO NOTE THAT PlayWriting Australia has roughly equal numbers – so women are being selected in that arena for development by a national writers’ organisation and are therefore being exposed in showcases to industry but are not being picked up in the same % for the productions.

PLAYWRITING AUSTRALIA National Play Festival 2010

7 plays in all

4 plays by women

3 plays by men

PLAYWRITING AUSTRALIA National script workshop

6 plays in all

4 plays by women

2 plays by men

Women playwrights-again

2011-01-13T10:22:00.002+11:00

The article in the SMH on Saturday 8 January prompted a response by Derek Parker titled Men Dominate As Great Playwrights - At This Stage that we just could not jump up and down about.

Our reply is published in the SMH today. Just scroll down the letters to Women Writ Large.

Women Playwrights—the issue that won't go away

2011-01-10T09:50:00.011+11:00

There was an article in Saturday's The Sydney Morning Herald about the continued under-representation of women playwrights on our subsidised stages. Read it here.
Just my personal opinion (Noëlle) and no doubt many will disagree, but I think development is so not the issue. Surely we're not saying that female writers need more 'development' than their male counterparts? And if over 50% of the works supported by Playwriting Australia are written by women, what happens to them?

Readings of jazz poetry from extempore

2011-01-08T14:47:00.001+11:00

If you happen to be in Sydney next Saturday, why not come along to the Readings of jazz poetry from extempore at the Macleay Bookshop, 103 Macleay Street, Potts Point? I'm (this is Noëlle) reading along with fellow poets Andrew Lindsay, Lynn Hard, Nigel Roberts and Arjun von Caemmerer.

Saturday 15 January, 6:00—8:00.

Hope you can come.

Wrap Up '10 ... continued

2010-12-31T09:52:00.002+11:00

NED's year began in Venice and ended in Melbourne. Quite a ride as neither were exactly planned. In between there's been two short plays for Stories from the 428 and Brand Spanking New. A tentative dip into the world of sports journalism. A trip to China with 20 kids from my "old" school (NHSPA) performing everywhere from World Expo to Xangzhou to Deng Feng on stages huge and tiny. There's been a production of Blackrock with a cast of teenagers. My new kids play "Alice Dreaming" has been published by Cambridge University Press. I've written a draft for a new play which found its way to the bin (recycling, of course). I've written two more plays for Bell Shakespeare's Actors at Work program. I've finished my ubiquitous film script which I'm going to re-write and set in Melbourne. I've wondered what happened to that commercial play I sent off and my ABC Radio play? Nearly finished the chapters I'm writing for a Drama Textbook. Why oh why? I've been inspired by my colleagues and frustrated by having to juggle so many balls. I'm finally settled having commuted for 12 weeks and wondering how the hell people do it. I'm looking forward to writing without interruption and whatever the future may bring.

2010 Wrap-up from 7-ON continued ...

2010-12-27T18:15:00.007+11:00

NOËLLE: Thanks to an OzCo Literature Board grant, I’ve written a 50-minute monologue-cum-performance essay called Good With Maps, and commenced work on a non-fiction prose project, The Book of Thistles. Linked to this latter project, I researched, wrote and narrated Weeds Etc for ABC Radio National’s 360documentaries. Theatre-wise, 4 short pieces saw the light of production, including Smashed, a documentary-style script about binge drinking developed with Year 11 students at Springwood High School. And The Story of this Moment was short-listed for the inaugural Richard Burton Award for New Plays.

In the second half of the year I had poems and a one-act play published. The River that Ran Out was Highly Commended in the Trinity College London International Playwriting Competition 2010, and you can read it in Prize-winning Plays from the International Playwriting Competition 2010 (Pub. Orient Blackswan & TCL). It’s a 3-hander with an environmental theme for audiences of 11-years-old and under.

What else? September I spent in England and Denmark, combination of family visit and research for some poems. Got back just in time to catch the broadcast of The Stepping Stars of Bóronkowice on ABC Radio National’s Airplay. And last but not least, I’ve done a lot of thinking about what it is that I really want to write in the next while ...

DONNA: In 2010, I was part of two of Gus Supple’s projects - The 428 Project at Sidetrack Theatre and Brand Spanking New at At The New Theatre - writing three pieces all up: ‘Oliver Twist Is’, ‘Olympia and Phuong’, and ‘A Walk In The Park’. It was great to meet and work with new artists, and to now be talking to one or two of them about other things we might do together. I wrote ‘Aurora’s Lament’ for ABC Radio Drama, and collected my first AWGIE Award for my radio adaptation of ‘Mrs Macquarie’s Cello’. Thanks to the Australian Script Centre, ‘Tales From The Arabian Nights’ had five productions this year, including one in Atlanta Georgia. I also taught scriptwriting to some hungry students at Wesley Institute, and became a student myself, beginning a doctorate at the University of Wollongong. The doctorate is buying me some time to examine my practice, develop strategies for bouts of writing terror, and to experiment. In one experiment I wrote a play a day for a month; well, they are more like play prototypes, but it’s amazing what can emerge when perfectionism is over-ridden by speed, commitment and courage.

2010 wrap up from 7-ON

2010-12-20T13:54:00.001+11:00

Here we are at the end of 2010 all of a sudden. We thought this was a moment to check back over the year. It's odd really - you find that you've done quite a lot more than you think you have!

VANESSA..."2010 started and ended with mayhem and murder - writing for two TV shows. In the middle bit of 2010 I wrote a piece for Augusta Supple's theatrical omnibus - 'Stories From The 428'. 'Confetti' was directed by Glenn Hazeldine. I also had a play accepted by Playwriting Australia's National Script Studio, which was then picked up by Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre.

PORN.CAKE, directed by Pamela Rabe, will open on April 15th, 2011.

I was a mentor for the Australian Theatre for Young People's 'Fresh Ink' program and a tutor at their end-of-year National Studio in Bundanon. My feature screenplay, 'Love Struck Juliet' was runner-up in the AWG Rom-Com contest; my little boy turned four and I helped deliver my sister's second baby!

CATH..."2010. I fully expected to get nothing done but wait, watch and wonder. I lived in the non-verbal world of the visual arts, painted my mind out and was selected to exhibit in a group show at 'Artsite', a beautiful new space in Newtown. I was then selected for a solo show in June next year at the Chrissie Cotter Gallery. Suddenly there was an unexpected surge of writing - HERENOWTHERETHEN was commissioned for Augusta Supple's Brand Spanking New season; a fiull length play came to me in the space of a month and another is in the works. I've also been commissioned by ABC Radio to write a fifty-minute piece under the theme 'Crime Genre'.

Hope you all have a beautiful break."

VERITY... "2010 started, for me, as it will end, back at the farm at Kangarilla in South Australia. In between those two peaceful bookends it has been a rip-snorter of a year, a game-changer of a year in so many ways, quite a ride. The ABC broadcast a 35 minute play, "Joshua's Books"; I took part in an Inscription workshop headed up by Will Eno, a generous and very bright collaborator; Currency Press published 7-ON's 'Seven Needs' plays as part of their volume of short plays entitled 'Short Circuit'; I taught a playwriting course at the NSW Writer's Centre, as well as my regular classes for the Sydney City Council; I resigned after my fifth year on the National Executive Council of the AWG; spent a month in England and Europe (research, you understand, research...); took part in a workshop run by UK Meissner expert, Scott Williams, which culminated in a reading of a work-in-progress play of mine, 'The Ice Season'; and in the last quarter of the year had one play, 'The Sweetest Thing' produced in Sydney at Belvoir Downstairs and another 'A Crate of Souls' in Adelaide at the Adelaide College for the Arts. 'A Crate of Souls' was published by Phoenix Educational, while 'The Sweetest Thing' is available from the Australian Script Centre.

HILARY... "My year was also bookended - by two trips to Broome, researching my play for Black Swan, 'The White Divers of Broome' (inspired by John Bailey's history of the same name). The transformative part of the year happened in June, with my bunion operation - I now have a lovely left foot. Around that, I worked on the development of 'Take Up Thy Bed And Walk'
with Gaelle Mellis, for which we'll be in residence at Vitalstatistix in 2011; saw 'Beautiful Hands' recorded for ABC Radio; worked with Paul Capsis and Julian Meyrick on 'Angela's Kitchen' at Griffin; pushed 'Do And You Will Be Happy', a musical with composer Phillip Johnston, along to next-draft stage; and had a wonderful week with STC's Residents and puppeteer Alice Osborne workshopping 'The Splinter'. I was a Fresh Ink mentor, and taught many talented writers through Griffin, NIDA, the NSW Writers' Centre, Kambala and Randwick Council. Coming up is a play for the National's Connection's Programme, and a play for Barking Gecko in WA.

Reviews These Days ...

2010-11-09T12:29:00.002+11:00

From Verity...

It can be hard in these days of gradually vanishing newspaper coverage of the arts to nail enough reviews to give the punter a notion of what's on where and an idea of a number of people's take on a play.

'The Sweetest Thing' - currently playing at Belvoir Downstairs (until Sunday, November 21st) has only caught one review in a major newspaper - being bumped consistently for coverage of the STC's production of Sam Shepard's 'True West'. Which is fine, of course. I'll give a nod to relativities here!

The good thing is the on-line community has more space to discuss a work and access to a greater range of informed subjective responses to new work so...here are three more reviews to round out the picture..

ABC Online from Jenny Blain: http://www.abc.net.au/arts/stories/s3059913.htm

Time Out from Pristine Ong:

http://www.timeoutsydney.com.au/theatre/event/19519/the-sweetest-thing.aspx

Alternate Media Group from Toby Boon:

http://www.altmedia.net.au/theatre-the-sweetest-thing-2/26983

Angela's Kitchen

2010-11-09T11:39:00.003+11:00

Hilary says...

'Angela's Kitchen' opens tomorrow night, a Griffin Theatre Company production at the Stables in Kings Cross.

It's a one-man show performed and written by the inimitable Paul Capsis, in conjunction with director Julian Meyrick, and myself as associate writer.

Paul and I met as teenagers in 1985 through Shopfront Theatre in Sydney's south. We became fast friends, bonded by our Surry Hills childhoods, our love of music that no one else was into, and theatre. We created a miniature surf musical that toured from Pastel's in the city to the Clarendon in Katoomba. Through Paul I met Julian, whose Kickhouse Theatre commissioned a play from me in 1993, leading to my working with Julian and Louise, and the beginning of that friendship.

Twenty or so years passed and we'd all gone off in different directions. So when Nick Marchand asked if I'd collaborate with Paul and Julian on 'Angela's Kitchen', I was overjoyed. Not only was it the opportunity to work with two dear and old friends, but also with two great artists, on a play about the world Paul came from when I first knew him.

Every word in the play is Paul's. My job as associate writer has been to help Julian craft, edit, and elucidate themes while, as a writer, staying out of the way. The play's power comes from the honesty and simplicity of Paul's story-telling, and it was clear that any literary conceits would diffuse this power.

While we have made no attempt to make the play be about more than it is, the experience of the migrant's flight from trauma to safety is a universal one – there are few Australians who cannot claim it as part of their family history. Angela's story provides a window into an ordinary life – a Maltese immigrant, a wife and mother, living in Surry Hills. This ordinary life is made of epic stuff – war, death, courage, endurance. The world is full of such windows, such 'ordinary' lives. By letting us glimpse into Angela's, Paul makes us consider where we come from, how we came to be what we are, how our actions shape our children.

Find out more about ANGELA'S KITCHEN at Griffin

Our Melbourne cast

2010-11-09T10:23:00.001+11:00

Here's our Melbourne cast and director at the reading of The Seven Needs last Thursday.

As we're mostly Sydney-based, it was only Ned (who is about to become a Melbourne resident) who was able to get along to the reading. See the previous post for his account of the evening.

For more info about MKA Richmond's Open Season go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/Richmond-Australia/MKA/129779870388203 or check out the company at http://www.wix.com/mkamkamka/mkarichmond

Or read the indefatigable Augusta Supple's post about the company here.

7 NEEDS

2010-11-05T15:18:00.002+11:00

I arrived in Melbourne slightly jaded having said good bye to my home of 20 years and wondering where I'm gonna lay my head for next few weeks when I'm back in Sydney. I said a quick hello to the family and headed off to MKA Richmond for the reading of 7NEEDS. There was one slight hitch that being that MKA had been informed that they couldn't operate a Theatre in their space. I wondered if the reading would be on at all.

I found the address and noticed a few people surreptitiously gathered outside a doorway. I thought I'd lost my mind and this was the inner city Melbourne of John Wren fame; sly grog, sp bookies and the rest. I waved the family good bye and slipped inside. MKA had indeed been given notice but that seemed to be no deterrent for them. Tobias and Glynn told me they'd already found a new venue and handed me a beer.

The space is amazing. These guys have converted what was effectively Tobias' living room into a Theatre. It's roughly the same size of La Mama in the early days. It's a crying shame that Richmond Council have given the the flick but I reckon it'll be Richmond's loss more than it will be MKA's.

We sat down and 7NEEDS took off. This was the first time all 7 plays had been put together and what a revelation it was! Director Paige Marshall arranged the plays in order to reflect Maslow's hierarchy of needs starting with Food, Shelter, Sex and moving up through the others. Paige structured the piece like a pyramid and it made sense. The audience loved it and it struck me what gold we 7 had mined. 7 minds riffing on 7 needs in 7 entirely original voices. Really exciting. What an amazing introduction to the world of Melbourne Theatre! MKA are a breath of fresh and it was an invigorating to get a taste of it.

If you're in Melbourne ...

2010-10-29T22:41:00.002+11:00

7-ON's first ever project was The Seven Needs - 7 short plays inspired by Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of human needs: food, shelter, sex, safety, belonging, respect and spirit. These plays were performed individually throughout the Griffin Theatre Company's 2007 season. However, Melbourne punters have a chance to see the seven plays read as one unified piece at 8pm on Thursday the 4th of November at MKA Richmond 2/24 Tanner Street Richmond. The cast is: Francesca Waters, Laura Maitland, Terry Yeboah and Paul Goddard, and the director is Paige Marshall. The readings are part of Open Season, MKA Richmond's month long reading program of new Australian plays. The Seven Needs are published in the anthology Short Circuit, by Currency Press, and will be available for sale on the night. For tickets and more information go to
http://www.greentix.com.au/events/133419

The Sweetest Thing

2010-10-25T11:30:00.004+11:00

Verity's play The Sweetest Thing is coming to Belvoir ...

To see the trailer, point your mouse at the image, right click, select 'Show All' from the dropdown menu, and away you go ...

We couldn't help noticing ...

2010-10-03T16:41:00.005+11:00

We’re really pleased that the theatre companies have taken responsibility for a more than token inclusion of female directors in their 2011 seasons. Perhaps they were inspired by the many and various forums, events, newspaper articles, and blog posts bemoaning the paucity of women directors and writers when last year's subscription seasons were announced? But ... we couldn’t help noticing ...

1. Sydney Theatre Company
Main Season:
In The Next Room by Sarah Ruhl (American) female playwright.
Bloodland is listed as ‘story by Kathy Marika, Stephen Page and Wayne Blair’.
But it is as yet unwritten, according to Stephen Page, who spoke for it at the season launch. Don’t know that you can count this in terms of female writer numbers really ...

So … That’s 1 (overseas) female playwright in a season of 12 plays.

2. Belvoir Street Theatre
Upstairs:
Neighbourhood Watch by Lally Katz.

Downstairs:
The Dark Room by Angela Betzien.

That’s 2 plays by (Australian) female playwrights in an overall season of 13 plays.

3. Griffin Theatre Company
Main season:
This Year's Ashes by Jane Bodie.

Independent Season:
Smashed by Lally Katz.

That’s 2 out of 8.

4. Ensemble Theatre (and yes, we know they don’t receive public/government arts subsidy, but still ... )

No female writers in a season of 8 plays.

So … out of 41 plays being presented by/through Sydney professional mainstage theatre companies in 2011 there are just 5 plays by female writers, and one of those is by an American, and 2 are by (bless her!) Lally Katz.

This comes to (approximately) 12%.

And who buys the tickets? Mostly women, we know. So ... predominantly female audiences are listening to ... predominantly male voices.

Theatre companies all ... that’s pathetic actually, don’t you think?

Awgie Award for Donna

2010-09-21T09:14:00.000+10:00

Here's Donna with writer Catherine Fargher at the AWGIE Awards in August. The production of her winning script Mrs Macquarie's Cello can be heard on Airplay, Radio National, 3pm 26th September.

Free readings of two 7-ON Plays at Stables Theatre this Sunday 29th

2010-08-22T19:00:00.002+10:00

The plays of two 7-ON writers, Verity Laughton and Catherine Zimdahl are being read this coming Sunday 29th August at the Stables Theatre from 4pm. See details below.

This event is free - just rsvp to the email address below.

THE IMPULSE COMPANY & INSCRIPTION present:

FROM THE PAGE TO THE STAGE: Three Readings by Impulse Company Actors

Sunday, August 29th, from 4pm at the Stables Theatre, Nimrod St, Darlinghurst

**FREE OF CHARGE**

On Sunday, 29th August, the SBW Stables Theatre will play host to a very exciting FREE event; ‘The Impulse Company’s Festival of New Writing.’ Audiences will be treated to an evening of staged readings with three new Australian plays being performed by Impulse Company Actors who have been trained by Scott Williams (Impulse Company Artistic Director) during his recent series of Sydney Workshops. Combining the dynamic performance style of The Impulse Company's training with the sharp, contemporary writing being practiced by these three local writers, this is an extraordinary one-off opportunity to share in the live performance of some brilliant new upcoming dramas.

The plays included in the Festival are: THE ICE SEASON by Verity Laughton. "An investigation of faith and fate, art, love and damage in the contemporary Western World" is how Ms Laughton describes her play, which concerns the events following the death of famed novelist, Thomas Allen. Verity Laughton's plays include The Lightkeeper, The Snow Queen, Burning, Carrying Light and The Mourning After. Her most recent large scale production was a puppetry adaptation of Patricia Wrightson's The Nargun and the Stars. THE ICE SEASON won the 2009 Inscription Open Award.

DEVIANT ART FOR THE DEGENERATE by Catherine Zimdahl. A play "about class and power, idealism and absolutism and the treachery of conformity," according to Ms Zimdahl. The story revolves around a young expressionist artist and the art world into which she's drawn into in Sydney, 1946. Ms Zimdahl's credits include the plays Clark in Sarajevo, Family Running for Mr Whippy, A Day Too Great, the children’s play The Rocky Road to Riches, and the adaptation of the classic novel Moonfleet. Her film script The Ego Trip is currently in development.

SLEEPING DOGS by Brenda Gottsche. Dr. Roz Collins, a popular radio psychologist, is just set to become the next Oprah Winfrey when troublesome 'sleeping dogs' awake and ransack her life. Brenda Gottsche's produced plays include The Balmain Jesus (originally developed by The Impulse Company in London as The Fulham Jesus), Hot Property and The Max Factor. She divides her time between Sydney and London, and is currently in pre-production for a film script based on The Fulham Jesus.

The performers include: Abigail Austin, Claudia Barrie, Angeline Bilas, Lindsay Chapman, Carolyn Eccles, Lucy Fry, Natalie Lund, Matt Minto, Dene Kermond, Jacqui Livingston, Kate Skinner and the performance will be directed by The Impulse Company's Artistic Director, Scott Williams.

There will be a 20-min interval between each reading and audience members are encouraged to stay for as many plays as they wish Tickets will be allocated on a RSVP system so please email all ticket requests to impulsecosydney@hotmail.com

SO PUT IT IN YOUR DIARY, GRAB A GROUP OF FRIENDS AND HEAD DOWN TO THE SBW STABLES THEATRE FOR A FANTASTIC EVENING OF NEW AUSTRALIAN WRITING, DYNAMIC, ENGAGING PERFORMANCES & FESTIVAL FUN IN THE NEWLY RENOVATED STABLES THEATRE.

Hooray, but ...

2010-08-04T14:03:00.005+10:00

We couldn't help noticing that PlayWritingAustralia has just announced an initiative to support new playwrights (‘playwrights who have not yet been professionally produced’), as well as the encouragement for Tasmanian playwrights only to apply for the Winter Season development this year. We applaud both initiatives but want to note for the record that the funding for the first initiative would seem to come from the funding that Arts NSW made available to PWA in place of the lost $30,000 prize money that should have been awarded to a mid or senior level playwright in the recent Premier's Awards.

It's great that the Minister made a replacement $30,000 available.

It's great that she asked the punch-above-its-weight PWA to administer it.

It's great to support emerging and regional playwrights (and sorry, Tasmanians, if we're making assumptions here ...).

But, Minister, where do you think playwrights go when they've emerged?

Can we put forward a parallel? When one starts work in the public service one begins at entry level. One serves one's time, takes advantage of training schemes and mentorships and all the possible support options available to further one's practice until - voila! - a a pretty talented and knowledgeable bureaucrat emerges. At this point the bureaucrat nails a good job and begins to make a difference to his/her society. Some even reach a position of significant decision-making. No one suggests, either explicitly or implicitly that, once trained, they should make way for others and instead...get a job as a teacher, or a cleaner or something/anything to pay the bills and work at their 'real job' in between. It'd be a real waste, surely?

What writers do is necessary, and even essential. As the excellent British playwright, David Edgar, has said: "Storytelling is central to our being as humans. Without it we would be constrained within the dungeon of our own direct experience. We would find it hard to plan - to imagine a series of actions and their consequences. And we couldn't empathize, with the good or the bad...By enabling us to imagine what it is like to see the world through other eyes (including the eyes of the violent and the murderous) drama develops capacities without which we cannot live together in societies at all."

At the moment (and there are always exceptions when someone is running hot with both work and profile for a few years) a writer with more than five (should we make it ten or fifteen?) years of experience cannot make the kind of living even a base grade, newby clerk would make in the public service.

Thank you for being concerned about the arts, and artists but ... Don't start what you can't continue. Support all levels of playwriting, or none at all.

7-ONer short-listed

2010-07-18T13:08:00.003+10:00

Vanessa's play Porn.Cake, which was in this year's Playwriting Australia National Script Workshop, is short-listed for the 2010 Griffin Award.

The winner will be announced on the 17 August.

7-ON's AWGIE Nominations

2010-06-22T09:17:00.002+10:00

Donna and Noëlle are both nominated for 2010 AWGIE Awards. Donna for Mrs Macquarie’s Cello in the Radio (Adaptation) category, and Noëlle for Dark Paradise in the Radio (Original) category.

The AWGIE nominations were announced yesterday by the AWG. Read the complete list of nominees here.

Sustainable careers

2010-06-14T13:55:00.004+10:00

The debate about the missing NSW Premier’s Literary Award continues ... and widens. Check out Performance Anxiety, Alison Croggan’s article in the June issue of The Australian Literary Review. And here is a copy of a letter/suggestion sent to Arts NSW and Playwriting Australia by 7-ON.

Dear Alexandra and Chris,

I'm writing as a representative of 7-ON, a playwrights' group of seven established playwrights resident in Sydney (Donna Abela, Vanessa Bates, Hilary Bell, Noëlle Janaczewska, myself, Ned Manning and Catherine Zimdahl.)

We were intrigued to note that when the Playwriting Award was not made this year as part of the Premier’s Awards, a decision was made that the funding would instead be diverted to new playwrights. It is our understanding that the funding was devolved to Playwriting Australia to administer, but that a binding decision has not been made on precisely how it will be spent.

We are in full agreement of playwrights being supported while they are writing their first few plays, but note that the Premier’s Award, for a produced play, was the only direct funding of an established playwright available from Arts NSW (apart from one annual NSW Writer's Fellowship, which is also open to writers of other genres).

This fact is unfortunate but just part of the general state of affairs that makes it extremely difficult not only to start but to maintain a career as a writer for performance in Australia.

In the meantime, the attached opportunity for an UK-based writer came to our attention. We wondered if it might not provide a model for funding an established writer (in tandem with any of the major theatre companies in the state)? That is to say, an alternative use of the $30,000 that would have gone to an established working playwright had the award been made in 2010.

Best regards,
Verity Laughton (for 7-ON)

What we've been doing these past 6 months ...

2010-06-07T13:30:00.005+10:00

We’re about to hit the half-way point of the year, so time for a bit of a round up. Here’s what we’ve all been doing outside 7-ON …

Donna: I’m headlong into the first few months of a creative writing doctorate which has brilliantly given me the chance to read read read plays and write write write new things in new ways. I’m having serious fun setting up ‘experiments’, the latest being to write a play a day for the month of June, which is scary and exhilarating and revelatory. Suzan-Lori Parks, who wrote a play a day for a year, inspired this somewhat more modest attempt. Other things? There’s a radio play for the ABC inching towards the end of a first draft. And another delay on the start of the draft of The Monkey King for Theatre of Image due to the complexities of international co-productions. And a scriptwriting curriculum to rehash before the start of semester two.

Vanessa: My new play Porn.Cake has been selected for this year’s National Script Workshop, I’m looking forward to rubbing shoulders with Lally Katz and Jane Bodie and other writerly folk in June. New short play Small Hard Things is floating in the ether. Was shortlisted for the AWG RomCom script competition with Love Struck Juliet, lovely to be one of five but no cigar there. I’m currently immersed in my final draft for my episode of series 3 EastWest101, and as soon as that’s off my plate other deadlines will be crossly bashing on my door. Plus, ongoing war with headlice and preschool, can I talk about that? No? OK then. That’s me!

Hilary: I’m working on a big sprawling epic of a play for Black Swan in Perth, inspired by John Bailey’s non-fiction book, The White Divers of Broome. I’m also collaborating with Julian Meyrick and Paul Capsis on Angela’s Kitchen, about Paul’s Maltese grandmother, to be performed at Griffin in November. I’ve just returned from Adelaide, workshopping Take Up Thy Bed And Walk, with designer Gaelle Mellis and three fabulous performers, about nineteenth-century fiction concerning ‘wheelchair-bound’ girls. And next month ABC Radio will record Beautiful Hands, written with composer Phillip Johnston and inspired by Charlotte Gilman-Perkins’ Gothic horror-story, The Yellow Wallpaper.

Noëlle: Been immersed in the world of weeds, working on a feature for ABC Radio called Weeds Etc (goes to air 31 July) and researching one of the 2 projects I got an OzCo Literature Board grant for. The other Lit. Board project is Bounce, a monologue about my journey to the Amazon and my father’s through Parkinson’s disease to our last ‘great unknown’—death. (It’s funnier and not nearly as grim as it sounds from that description.) What else? A poem won a prize in Scotland, Smashed, a short about binge drinking developed with Year 11 students at Springwood High School, goes on in Penrith early July, and then there’s a return to the commission for Melbourne’s Eleventh Hour: a sequel to The Merchant of Venice—sort of. Set in Berlin during the winter of 1946/7.

Verity: Joshua’s Books, a radio play of mine, was broadcast on the ABC in March this year and since then I’ve been working on two other projects. Crate of Souls, is a semi verbatim/semi magical realist piece to be produced as the graduate show for the 13 third year acting students at the Adelaide College for the Arts. My other script, What Has Been Taken, was written for a Literature Board grant in 2008 and deals with, among other things, political terrorism in Pakistan. And in October this year a play written some years ago, The Sweetest Thing, is to be produced in an upcoming indie-curated season here in Sydney (details out soon!).

Ned: My 2010 ‘Actors at Work’ shows are currently touring NSW schools. Rehearsals for the Vic/Qld/Tas and the SA/WA/NT teams begin in July. The shows will play to about 10,000 school kids throughout the country. My new play Alice Dreaming is about to be published by Cambridge University Press (July). I am currently working on a Drama textbook for schools to be published by Cambridge. I am also working on a new play for adults. My radio play, an adaptation of Women of Troy is with the ABC. I am hopeful (always hopeful!) of a workshop of a new play which I have been developing with Wayne Harrison some time later in the year. As well as this my screenplay for a kids film is doing the rounds and all my fingers and toes are crossed!

Catherine: Working very hard on ‘Primary Maternal Attachment’. Forthcoming ABC Radio National productions of A Day Too Great (adapted from the stage play) and The Fox, based on an Inuit Folk Tale.

Afterthought

2010-04-25T13:41:00.011+10:00

A bit off topic perhaps, but just riffing on from the last post and comments. In The Culture of the New Capitalism, sociologist Richard Sennett discusses how we have moved from a culture that valued craftsmanship and experience to one in which potential is paramount. What he terms 'the specter of uselessness' now shadows workers across the board—multi degree-holding professionals and manual labourers alike. This is also an idea explored by one of my (this is Noëlle writing) favourite sociologists, Zygmunt Bauman. Over-simplifying here, but essentially ZB's thesis is that globalisation has given rise to a fluid life (liquid modernity) in which our central anxiety is the fear of being dumped or pushed aside.

You can read an interview ZB gave in 2005 here on OpenDemocracy.

How does this relate to theatre?

Well, on a personal note, I find ZB's ideas really interesting; I'm working on a piece which draws on them—still in its early stages. But secondly, and more generally, the decision of Arts NSW and the judges of this year's play entries to reallocate the $30,000 prize money from an award that recognises achievement to a development program seems bang in line with what Sennett and ZB are saying.

Playwrights are the homeless of the arts

2010-04-19T14:07:00.007+10:00

There was an interesting discussion on today's ABC Radio National's The Book Show about the judges' decision that none of the (approximately 25) entered plays deserved the $30,000 NSW Premier's Literary Award for 2010. Listen online or download here. Michael Gurr's passion on the subject was great. Go Michael!

The info on the Arts NSW website says that the unawarded $30,000 will go to supporting 'new playwrights'. Given that these kinds of prizes are usually won by established and/or mid-career writers (yes, it’s a gross generalisation), this reallocation represents a noteworthy shift of emphasis.

Why is this country so hopeless when it comes to supporting its established artists?

More on the Women Artists Thing ...

2010-03-29T09:22:00.006+11:00

We discovered this article - a little after the event - but it's a subject that clearly isn't going to go away any time soon, so ... for your interest, men and women of the theatre, click here to read The glass curtain by Anne Marie Welsh, first published in The San Diego Union-Tribune in 2005.

2010-03-15T17:23:00.002+11:00

Well , its March and that means Actors at Work begin rehearsing three shows written by Ned Manning. Trust and Betrayal, Romeo and Juliet Intensive and Hamlet Intensive. Trust and R&J have been completely re-written and are virtually new shows. Actors at Work tour extensively throughout Australia under the Bell Shakespeare banner. They play to an audience of upwards of 60,000 students from Melbourne to Palm Island, from Perth to Hobart, from Alice Springs to Sydney. Ned has now written ten shows for Actors at Work.

Stories from the 428

2010-03-02T09:16:00.008+11:00

Four of 7-ON (Donna, Vanessa, Noëlle & Ned) are involved in Augusta Supple’s latest project, Stories from the 428.

The 428 is a bus route that goes from Sydney’s Circular Quay to Canterbury in the city’s inner south-west. Given the recent release of the Public Transport Blueprint for Sydney, it’s pretty topical—but more than that, it’s a great initiative because it brings together a whole bunch of writers and other artists to work on something that goes from ‘whoa to go’ in less than 3 months. There are 16 participating writers and we’re a mix of the more experienced and less experienced. We have different styles, sensibilities, interests, and approaches to creating our 10-minutes of material, so come along and see Stories from the 428.

There are 2 different shows with 8 writers apiece, each running for a one-week season. Vanessa & Ned are in Week 1, Donna’s & Noëlle’s work is in Week 2.

Stories from the 428
Week 1: Wed 24—Sat 27 March, 8:00 pm & Sun 28 March, 5:00 pm.
Week 2: Wed 31 March—Sat 3 April, 8:00 pm & Sun 4 April, 5:00 pm.
Sidetrack Theatre, 142 Addison Road, Marrickville. (The 428 bus stops just outside.)

Check out the project’s website and on Facebook.

There's Something About Eels ...

2010-02-12T09:09:00.008+11:00

There's Something About Eels … which won the 2009 AWGIE (Australian Writers’ Guild) Award for best Original Radio Script, is being repeated on Saturday 20 February. Produced by ABC Radio National the piece is written & narrated by me (Noëlle), produced by Sharon Davis and sound engineered by Russell Stapleton.

The eel has an image problem. Koalas, giant pandas, dolphins, butterflies, kittens—some of nature’s creatures are Hallmark-cute and appealing. Others inspire respect and awe. But some—like the eel—make us shudder. A slippery fish that lurks in the mud of river beds, or coils up from the ocean floor to scare divers. But there’s much more to the eel than meets the eye. It’s an elusive creature, and a tasty one—eels are one of the human race’s survival foods. A creature with not only a remarkable life cycle, but also one with a long cultural history across cultures and continents. There's Something About Eels … combines science, literature, history, anecdote, reverie and culinary art in a radio portrait of this maligned, misunderstood and unusual creature.

ABC Radio National: 360documentaries

Saturday 20 February at 2:00 pm

Wednesday 24 February at 1:00 pm

downloadable for 4 weeks after initial broadcast

Hope you can listen.

The Dag End Of The Year, or Happy Christmas

2009-12-22T15:29:00.002+11:00

We're now at the end of another fierce year in play-writing land.

Don't know what it was like in the other capitals but there was much good work to be seen in Sydney. My own highlights (this is Verity here) were the Katona Jozsef Theater Company's production of Chekhov's 'Ivanov' (part of Fergus Linehan's final Sydney Festival), directed by Tomas Ascher, and Opera Australia's production of Benjamin Britten's 'Peter Grimes', directed by Neil Armfield, right at the top of his form. For me, these were both 'compleat theatre' experiences - the drug that keeps you hanging in there even even if you only get the hit once or twice a year.

But there was much else to beguile the heart and mind - 'Wars of the Roses', 'A Streetcar Named Desire' (STC); Back to Back's 'Food Court' (with The Necks);'Kafka's Monkey' (featuring the extraordinary Kathryn Hunter; 'Apocalypse Bear' (Lally Katz with Luke Mullins and Brian Lipson); 'Gorky's 'Summerfolk' (workshop production at Belvoir directed by Eamon Flack) and 'Bagdhad Wedding' (also Belvoir, directed by Geordie Broookman and yes, I'm proud of my boy...I also thought 'Metro Street', 'Knives in Hens', 'Ghosts' and 'Toy Symphony' were fantastic, but I digress...)

The point is - apart from me and my family - which is, I agree, Not The Point, though there do seem to be a lot of them - that any such list, however well backed up by articulate reasons why, will be subjective. I can think of at least one of the titles above that a fellow 7-ONer or two (whose intelligence and acute perception I can vouch for) loathed to high heaven. But that we seek such theatrical epiphanies, and sometimes find them, and that we seek to make such epiphanies, and sometimes feel that we come quite close to making them, is of the nature of our work. It's a cruel work to be engaged in because it demands, and can take, everything.

I had a personal high point in the middle of the year with the chance to work with Edward Albee (through Marcus West's 'Inscription' workshops) on a new draft of one of my current plays, 'The Ice Season'. Again, this is subjective. I think all the playwrights working with Albee were to some degree in his thrall, but I know other people who, after his sell-out 'Conversation' with Jonathon Biggins at the Sydney Theatre, were dismissive. For me he was - utterly - the real deal, the 'compleat playwright', the old magician. I felt connected by him through his wicked subversion and razor sharp readings of persons and plays and above all through his body of work which includes not one but two definite masterpieces and a couple of other possible ones, right back, back, back to the long, long line of exceptional minds that have made and built and shaped and crafted the intellectual inheritance of 'theatre in the Western world'. It was one of the great gifts of my life.

And then we got to the dag end of the year with the furore about women writers and directors being unconsciously shafted in terms of their possible careers and it all became a bit depressing really.

Because - speaking (only too!) personally, I'm also in that other - ah- difficult - categeory of mid-career writer.

Most mid-career writers do make a living between (a bit of) community theatre, some radio work, working with teaching institutions and so on. But most mid-career playwrights I know are also now looking to productions of the plays that they write from their own writerly compulsion - the real ones, the ones they care about and will experiment with and want to push their craft with - in the indie scene rather than on stage in one of the major companies.

We know no one intends to sideline us, no one intends to write off our lifetimes' of thought and feeling and lessons and craft, just at the point where we might be beginning to contemplate our own version of Albee's 'Who Is Sylvia, or The Goat' (written in his eighties - how dare anyone underestimate him!?)

But, sorry folks, that's exactly what you're doing.

I love what The Malthouse is doing for auteur directorial work and combined teams of artists, who were, it's true, selected against in previous years, but lately I am also mourning the old Playbox Theatre, where each year eight or more new Australian plays were accepted, worked on, produced in either a large or smaller space and published, even if in their early rehearsal form, which we all know is not ideal. But if you think about it - Playwriting Australia will present eight plays at their Festival in 2010. It's a great line-up, and even has a good balance between genders, and playwriting types, range and ages. But the presentation of these plays in workshopped versions is basically to allow them (this is cynical but I did say this is the dag end of the year...) to be cherry picked by the theatre companies for possible productions. this is the exact equivalent of eight plays that would have made up a season at Playbox, with all that actual production implies for the development of the craft and careers of those playwrights concerned.

Well and all. I am not finishing on a good note, am I? I will try to find my more pleasant face tomorrow. In the meantime I want to celebrate the fun of working with young and hungry (see, I do love you even as you whizz right past me!) actors, directors, writers in a couple of short-term ventures. It was such fun to 'just do it'. And also my cohorts here at 7-ON, who have made the difference this year in (trying to) stay the distance.

Happy Christmas, and see you next year, fellow-addicts all.

Verity (for herself, and not for 7-ON, though one or two of her cohorts may share - some of - her conclusions - possibly...)

Don't forget the playwrights ...

2009-12-05T09:43:00.003+11:00

An article in The Australian about the paucity of female directors and the upcoming forum at Belvoir. It's great that this issue is generating so much coverage—perhaps we really are at a tipping point?—but let's not forget that female playwrights are equally under-represented. Pity that Belvoir didn't think to include a writer on tomorrow's panel ...

THE BLOODY BRIDE at Riverside

2009-12-03T00:33:00.004+11:00

Short notice, folks, but if you're anywhere near Parramatta tonight (December 3), swing by for a presentation of the completely rewritten 'The Bloody Bride', and some free wine afterwards! The event is also free.

Contact Riverside Theatres for more information.

7-On Blog-followers will know that this play was commissioned and produced by NORPA last year. But not convinced that we'd discovered everything this idea had to offer, director Julian Louis and myself have knocked it into a new shape. It's been an interesting process, redrafting a play that's already had a professional production. And the pulling of a thread or two has meant, essentially, a reweaving of the entire fabric. Riverside Theatres' support has allowed us to explore this new draft with three fine actors - Nicholas Hope, Megan Drury and Aidan Gillett - under the guidance of dramaturg Peter Matheson.

The read starts at 6.30, and we'd love you to stick around and tell us what you think afterwards.

Hilary Bell.

Not There Yet

2009-11-19T16:09:00.009+11:00

The debate about the under-representation of women playwrights (and directors) on our better-funded stages continues.

This debate is an important one—for all of us, female and male, who care about access and equality. And it's also important that it doesn't end up focused solely on emerging writers and the establishment of training or mentoring programmes.

Because the problem for women writers and directors is not lack of training. It’s lack of opportunity, specifically the lack of certain kinds of opportunity.

Women writers and directors, at least in Sydney, are active and well-represented in community contexts and youth theatres, in co-ops and unfunded fringe ventures. But how do we/they move from back rooms and basements to better funded and supported productions? Not for a second suggesting that the only worthwhile contexts in which to make and present work are mainstage, but being able to work across the whole theatre ecology is important if you want to develop and sustain a viable career.

A Queensland colleague alerted us to this essay, Not There Yet by the American playwright Marsha Norman.

'Discussing the status of women in the theatre feels a little like debating global warming. I mean, why are we still having this discussion? According to a report issued seven years ago by the New York State Council on the Arts, 83 percent of produced plays are written by men—a statistic that, by all indications, remains unchanged. Nobody doubts that the North Pole is melting, either—we see it on the news. These are both looming disasters produced by lazy behavior that nobody bothered to stop. End of discussion. What we have to do in both cases is commit to change before it is too late.'

Click here to read the rest of this excellent piece.

MILO and FORTUNE - out they go!

2009-10-22T10:29:00.003+11:00

Currency Press playscripts of Ned Manning's MILO and Hilary Bell's FORTUNE are selling cheap, a mere $2 a copy if you buy in bulk (teachers take note!).

To purchase, please Email Hilary Bell.

FORTUNE
Cold Bath Creek, 1861. 11-year-old Chang is a giant, and the property of a brutal souvenir portrait photographer on the goldfields. Kathleen, an ex-convict, lures Chang from this miserable existence with promises of a better life, but she too exploits him, touring him as a freak. Driven to desperate measures by Kathleen's jealous lover, Duck, Chang is forced to discover his own superior strength. The tale is in counterpoint with the story of Iris, an anglophilic Chinese hotelier, and her Chinese-operatic descent into madness.
· 2 acts
· 3 males
· 2 females

MILO
As Australia moves into a new millennium, two couples in their thirties wrestle with their changing relationships and their relationship with the Land.
Milo, a well-meaning if misguided dreamer, battles to cope with reality whilst his partner Di, a committed social reformer, battles with the conflicting demands of relationship and career. Toby, a fourth generation farmer, struggles with the life in the 21st century whilst his wife, Peg, contemplates her future as a mother and wife.
The play examines the evolving relationship in Australia between the City and the Bush and explodes a few inherent myths.
2 acts
2 males
2 females

Brand Spanking New + short plays

2009-10-13T16:27:00.002+11:00

Vanessa and Verity have both taken part - along with a positive embarrassment of new, established and emerging writers in the New Theatre's Brand Spanking New season of short plays. We met some great people, we thrashed our plays around a bit, we had fun. One of the things that was the most fun was simply the task to write something within a short period of time, to have it cast, produced, seen, enjoyed, to have learned from it and then...to move on.

We can get so stuck in the muddy muddy endless process of writing and rewriting and trying to sell a play over such a long period of time because let's face it, opportunities have shrunk over the last ten years. Well, they've shrunk and expanded. The independent scene is quite wild really with a plethora of work being self-produced, or co-produced with teams of new, young, energetic producers. And it's great - a tussle of striving minds and generosities of spirit and attitude all in the interest of making art. But main-stage opportunities have definitely decreased. There are only a very few playwrights in Australia who might write a play a year, learn from that and write another one the year after. Which is what you have to do to practice and practice and practice your craft.

This isn't meant to be a whinge. It's just meant to be a noting. Nothing can change until the macro situation of theatre companies being forced to rely on box office for such an enormous percentage of their budget changes. And that's a policy struggle and also a societal one, because the majority of the Australian population don't feel it to be a priority.

Until that happens adventurous new work - or work that doesn't rake in a big box office, which means work that is unaccompanied by a brand of some kind whether that is the brand of the actor or the writer - will be discriminated against in favour of work that, while hopefully is excellent, also contributes to the bottom line. (Tho' we know that fortunately there are exceptions to this from time to time...)

In the meantime - in, on and out. It was great!

The Seven Needs

2009-10-09T13:56:00.008+11:00

In 2007 we wrote 7 short scripts in response to psychologist Abraham Maslow's 'hierarchy of human needs'. The Seven Needs, which was produced by the Griffin Theatre Company as part of their 2007 season, has just been published by Currency Press in the anthology Short Circuit. Find out more here.

The Debate Moves South ...

2009-10-04T19:56:00.004+11:00

Here at 7-ON we love hearing about other coalitions and groups of artists 'doing it for themselves'. Check out the Australian Women Directors' Alliance, a recently formed non-profit coalition of professional women directors and theatre makers. There's some interesting, probing and provocative discussion on their blog about the participation and artistic practices of female directors, playwrights and performance-makers—and their under-representation on Melbourne's better-funded stages.

You can contact the AWDA here, or find them on Facebook.

The Belvoir thing

2009-09-24T11:22:00.008+10:00

There’s a lot going round on the blogosphere with regard to the latest Belvoir season.

It’s hard weighing into this one, isn’t it?

You don’t want to whinge; you don’t want to self-promote; you don’t want to cast aspersions on the work of your male peers, whom you admire as people and writers. You don’t really want to get stuck into a theatre company either, because whatever you may think of decisions made, the people who have been appointed to those positions have a perfect right to run the company the way they want to during the time they are employed to do so.

But … it WAS a moment when we saw the line up of blokes and the one woman on the ABC TV report …

For the record here is a list of female writers for the stage in Australia. We don’t know if any of them are currently in contact with Belvoir, or had any discussions with Belvoir in relation to the 2010 season.

As far as we know in terms of new work by Australian female playwrights only Alana Valentine, Jenny Kemp, Robyn Archer, Katherine Thomson, Beatrix Christian, Christine Evans, Leah Purcell (with Scott Rankin), Melissa Reeves, Linda Aronson, Val Levkowicz, Dallas Winmar, Jane Harrison, Kate Mulvaney and Julie Janson have had a mainstage gig at Belvoir Upstairs since 1985.

That’s 14 in 24 years.

As compared to 52 for men (not counting ‘company’ productions but counting both writers where a duo was concerned, as we have done for women writers). It’s possible that other Australian mainstage companies have similar track records.

We hope not.

The list below is also by no means exhaustive – it’s just those playwrights who happen to be female whose work those of us seconded to write this post know well enough to honour and who we’re certain are still writing. If we’ve missed anyone, apologies. It’ll be because we haven’t read or seen your work or because we think (possibly erroneously) you’re currently engaged in a more sensible way of making a living. But sing out if we’ve missed you! Give us a chance to make good.

We’ll start with 7-ON because that’s our tribe but there’s no particular order of merit or relevance implied.

Donna Abela, Vanessa Bates, Hilary Bell, Noëlle Janaczewska, Verity Laughton, Catherine Zimdahl, Alana Valentine, Suzie Miller, Catherine Fargher, Julie Janson, Louise Fox, Debra Oswald, Sue Smith, Leah Purcell, Elaine Acworth, Jan Cornall, Elizabeth Coleman, Beatrix Christian, Robyn Archer, Kate Smith, Ros Horin, Katherine Thomson, Linda Aronson, Van Badham, Melissa Reeves, Dallas Winmar, Catherine Fitzgerald, Rosalba Clemente, Sandra Shotlander, Angela Betzien, Delia Fetter, Karin Mainwaring, Merlinda Bobis, Jane Harrison, Mary Rachel Brown, Nicki Bloom, Patricia Cornelius, Kate Mulvaney, Jenny Kemp, Christine Evans, Heather Nimmo, Claire Heywood, Lally Katz, Tobsha Learner, Andrea Lemon, Maryanne Lynch, Val Levcowicz, Peta Murray, Hannie Rayson, Catherine Ryan, Kylie Trounson, Alma de Groen, Belinda Bradley, Angela Costi, Jane Bodie, Sally Richardson, Alison Lyssa, Chi Vu, Joanna Murray Smith, Suzanne Spunner, Jackie Smith, Andrea James, Margaret Cameron, Fiona Sprott.

Setting aside the new work by Australian male writers – because we can’t reduce this to an inter-gender competition with our male peers - is anyone seriously going to assert that not one of those women could not have written a better play than Englishwoman Polly Stenham’s adolescent-gothic That Face? (Actually, it’s quite interesting that the only female sensibility in the whole season is an adolescent one.)

There have been comments made on other blogs with regard to the number of (terrific) women on the board and in management at Belvoir). All this means - in the context of the 2010 season anyway - is that there are a great many extremely able women supporting and facilitating the creativity of a group of men.

Someone else produced statistics about the number of indigenous works programmed at Belvoir as an argument against any decision to seek a gender balance in terms of central creative roles. On the contrary, the programming of works by indigenous writers simply indicates – in the case of female writers - not that the fact that ‘things just ended up that way’ is because of limited material at a level of excellence available to go into the programming mix, but that the company has consistently been making very deliberate choices with regard to programming. And anyway, ‘things just ending up that way’ is a pretty crass definition of leadership.

We don’t think anyone is suggesting that this moment in time for Belvoir is result of any ill will. Or that it isn’t a difficult job supporting new Australian writing of any kind in an industry where the box office exercises a huge influence.

But where do we go from here? Not sure. An act of unconsciousness is a kind of betrayal. It requires either a mea culpa or an act of reparation on the part of the betrayer. Perhaps Belvoir could just say sorry and resolve to do better. Or perhaps each of those men involved in programming the 2010 season could resolve to champion at least one female Australian playwright next chance they got.

That’d be something.

AWGIES

2009-09-21T09:40:00.001+10:00

Seven playwrights all too busy to make regular posts on their collective blog. It's true! We do try, but it gets away from us from time to time.

But ... we did want to say that we're pleased and proud to announce that Noëlle Janaczewska won the 2009 Radio AWGIE for her non-fiction script, There's Something About Eels ...

And both Vanessa and I have been intending to post the odd comment from our current hero, Edward Albee, from the Inscription workshop that we did with him, and we haven't. Life feels too fast. It's ten p.m. right now, I have family coming and going and I'm way behind on the current draft of the current piece I'm attempting to craft, but maybe one thing that Edward said might work for everyone who drops by this site from time to time.

He said right at the beginning of the two week workshop that he would be looking at our plays in the light of " How each of us has succeeded to intention and whether that intention was worthwhile in the first place." I've been seeing a lot of theatre over the last month or so and it's been great to simply take that definition into each occasion with me. It doesn't matter if the show in question is my schtick or not, it doesn't matter if I had a good time or not, it simply matters if the people concerned succeeded according to their own intention and - the tougher judgment, and I don't see how you get away from subjectivity here - whether or not that intention was worthwhile in the first place.
Verity

BioHome

2009-09-02T17:36:00.003+10:00

Check out our colleague Catherine Fargher's wonderful on-line installation BioHome here.

7-ON's AWGIE Nominations

2009-07-15T07:28:00.002+10:00

Good news! 7-ON is well represented in this year’s AWGIE nominations.

In the Television Mini Series Original category Vanessa is one of the nominated writers for East West 101—Season 2.

In the Radio (Original) category Verity has 2 dramas Moon Door and Davy, and Noëlle has a drama and the non-fiction piece There’s Something about Eels …

Long Shadows and Short Pieces

2009-07-05T09:53:00.005+10:00

Inspired initially by the extraordinary forensic photographs in the City of Shadows exhibition (and book) 7ON has been busy of late (she laughed quietly and slightly insanely into her sleeve) wrestling theatrically with ideas of crime and punishment, inclusion and absence, social icon and social outcast, photography and immortality. There are probably fifty other things that we explored in the past fortnight with Director Lee Lewis, composer Phillip Johnston and the incredible actors that make up the STC Residents. Or maybe fifty thousand.
Teacups figured.
As did Sunlight Soap.
And the mysterious disappearance of Kingsford Smith.

It has been huge and fantastic and exhausting. There has been much talk and exploration and just trying things out, perched above the harbour at the Sydney Theatre Company. At times the sight of the sun sparkling off the water filled us with joy. At other times it gave us a migraine. At the end of all this work there was a three and a half hour presentation of...all this work.

Crikey Moses.

So what's next?

Next we go into a small dark room minus actors, director and sun on harbour. And we do that thing that writers do. We write. More. Or maybe less. Actually, much less, I reckon. Focus, edit, define, create.

We are seven different styles and experiences, we are seven different heads and hearts. It has been a fantastic fortnight.

More to come...

Watch this space.

Vanessaxx

Radio-play airing this weekend on Radio National

2009-06-30T17:28:00.003+10:00

Left Breathless A Question
Written by Catherine Zimdahl
ABC Radio Airplay
Sunday 5th July 3pm
Thursday 9th July 7pm (repeat)

Sometimes you are married to a stranger. Sometimes marriage is stranger than anything.

A barrister and his wife explore the complexities of a marriage from very different points of view. 'He' is dealing on a daily basis with relationships on the verge of collapse, seemingly unaware that his own marriage may also be vulnerable. 'She' hopes to find the answers to her endless questions by shopping.
Left Breathless A Question premiered at the Griffin Theatre in 2007. It was initiated as part of the 7-ON writers' collective project responding to Maslow's seven needs.

Written by Catherine Zimdahl
Featuring Peter Kowitz and Penne Hackforth Jones
Sound Engineer: Judy Rapley
Production: Michael Bates and Anna Messariti

And check this out ...

2009-06-19T08:55:00.006+10:00

Following on from the last post, check out this article from The Guardian: Leading Ladies Kept out of the Limelight: Conference hears of battle against ageism and sexism.
Only 9% of top films last year directed by women.

On the up side however, another article from The Guardian: Female Playwrights Set to Take West End by Storm. The writers are all young, so let's hope they've got long careers ahead of them.

What is going on here?

2009-06-17T15:46:00.011+10:00

If like me, you’ve been following the fabulous Mad Men on SBS, which is set in the early 1960s, you can probably understand why feminism became such a force in the decade that followed. Yes, the men evaluate the female characters in terms of their appearance and sexual availability, but far more insidious is their assumption that women are no-go zones when it comes to the life of the mind.

That’s Mad Men, that’s the 1960s, This is Sydney in 2009, and I’m a tad troubled by something I and a few colleagues, including fellow 7-ONers, are observing. Today we did a bit of a gender audit on Belvoir B Sharp’s 2009 season, and found: Women writers = 0; women directors = 2. Then there was that recent article about Neil Armfield’s decision to leave his position as Artistic Director of Belvoir Street Theatre after some 15 years, in which the talent waiting in the wings just happened to be all male. Speaking for myself, I’ll believe we’ve achieved equality when I read about a twenty-something female wunderkind!

But it’s not only Belvoir. The Sydney Morning Herald ran a piece about the current popularity of Russian plays and adaptations. The journalist discussed this trend with a number of directors, all male, and although the production Ladybird was referred to, its (female) director Lee Lewis was not named.

Most of us in 7-ON have taught performance writing in various contexts, and in nearly every instance female students greatly outnumber men. So what happens to them? At what point in the process are they being passed over? Do they give up when the going gets tough? Are they perhaps less committed than their male counterparts? Or do they side-step more readily into admin and support roles? Should we be asking those who commission and program to explain their criteria and decision-making processes?

Look, this is a vexed issue. As writers we want to get gigs on the strength and qualities of our work, not because of our gender, cultural background, place of residence or whatever. And I’m personally not in favour of affirmative action initiatives, which despite the best intentions, often end up marginalising rather than opening doors. But isn’t it time we asked: what the hell is going on here?

Mrs Macquarie's Cello goes to air

2009-06-12T23:34:00.002+10:00

ABC Airplay will broadcast my latest radio piece on Sunday 14th June at 3pm. It can be listened to online for the month after. But don't read the introductory information on their webpage. I've complained, spoken to the EP, and even written them a blurb, but there it is still, misinforming listeners and mis-crediting me. God damn. Read the bit below instead.

Elizabeth Macquarie, and her husband Governor Lachlan Macquarie, are remembered by history for having changed the direction of a penal colony into a settlement based more or less on merit and the rule of law, rather than rum and racketeering. Not everyone was happy with this new direction, and sidelined military and aristocratic factions worked hard to turn London opinion against the Governor. Lachlan was ultimately denounced in a Royal Commission of 1819, however, after his death in 1824, Elizabeth successfully campaigned to clear her husband's name. The play is set on the day Elizabeth receives this news, and is inspired by a range of sources including diaries, reports, letters, manuals for conserving musical instruments, a Robert Burns poem and a recipe for roast swan.

Mrs Macquarie's Cello was a co-production between Airplay, the Song Company and ABC Classic FM. It was written by Donna Abela with music composed by Raffaelo Marcellino. It re-imagines an earlier concert version along similar themes
written by Lisa Morrisset and composed by Raffaelo Marcellino.

Donna

Hitchers of Oz

2009-06-11T21:23:00.004+10:00

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. When I wrote it.
Then it arrived on the doorstep and I was excited. I flicked through the collection of short stories in The Hitchers of Oz and there it was. My first published short story. My heart swelled with pride. I went to the fridge, got myself a cold beer and sat down to read it. Apart from a few glaring grammatical errors, which I put down to "my wacky inarticulate style", it seemed ok.
Then.
A week ago.
But.. it's not a play. I can't point the finger at anyone else. I can't blame the actors or the director or the audience. I can't pretend it's not personal...'cause it is.
As the days go by and as I write this I'm not so sure what to think.
But it's there. It's in print.
So...if you wanna check it out...it's called The Hitchers of Oz and it's a whole lot of stories about hitchhiking in...Oz.
There you go.
Wasn't that hard.
Was it?
Ned Manning

NOTES FROM A 7-ONer

2009-06-02T11:38:00.004+10:00

This week I’ve been recovering from one of those weekends when too much theatre is not really enough. On the Friday night I went to a showing at the Fraser Studio OFF THE SHELF PROJECT (run by Queen Street Studios)

There were five shows of around 20 – 30 minutes each, of varying quality and ambition presented by a disparate group of mostly young and emerging writers, actors, directors. I hadn’t been to the Fraser Studio before (14 Kensington Street, Chippendale). It’s a fantastic space – big, barny rooms set up with basic theatrical facilities, plus even a small outside square of garden. It's always great to see what people are up to, but, apart from the specific personal connection that got me there in the first place, it wasn’t so much the shows themselves that I loved as the occasion...Persons collected together by a passion for expression that could only be fulfilled by – a space, some players and an audience. It’s the ambition, I think, of making something from nothing and then sharing the event. At whatever stage of your theatrical life you may be at – that’s the thing that first drew you in.

The next afternoon I went to the Patrick White Prize announcement, won by Nicki Bloom (with whom I also need to declare a connection), with the subsequent reading of her play, BLOODWOOD (commissioned by Griffin Theatre Company.) http://sydneytheatre.com.au/

Once again it was a combination of passion and ambition that got to me. The play we heard was a first draft, so it will change quite a lot before production I’m sure, but what impressed me – apart from the language, which is flexible, allusive and works on a number of levels - was that the play is wildly ambitious, particularly for someone’s second ever theatre piece.

That night I went to a bare bones performance of Maxim Gorky’s SUMMERFOLK, put on at the Belvoir Theatre Rehearsal space, directed by Eamon Flack, with a cast of seventeen (?) actors all performing for free. It is a monster of a piece – thoughtful, controlled, elegiac, passionate, a drama of lost dreams.

I was lucky enough to see the Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg’s production of Chekhov’s UNCLE VANYA a couple of Sydney Festival’s ago and then, last Sydney Festival, the Katona Jozef Theatre’s IVANOV followed this year by the fascinating Downstairs Belvoir production of Vassily Sigarev’s LADYBIRD, directed by Lee Lewis, where it seemed to me that the undercurrent running through was once again, as in Chekhov, as in Gorky, the monstrous, ongoing hibernation of the Russian bear, this fierce strange, unwieldy, unconscious ice-gripped society where passion and despair stumble hand in hand.

And again – even apart from the play - which it was a privilege, actually, to see – there was the feeling that here were a group of (this time) established artists who, for sheer passion for the medium had gathered together to mount a piece that should be seen every few years approached by a range of directors and actors and styles and companies but which, because of our shallow culture, we will not normally have access to. It was great, and liberating, too. Sometimes just the engagement with the material is enough.

Verity Laughton

Checklist for An Armed Robber

2009-03-08T22:34:00.003+11:00

Checklist For An Armed Robber by Vanessa Bates is being produced by Deckchair Theatre in W.A and directed by AD Chris Bendall (who directed a terrific production for Theatre@Risk in Melbourne in 2007). It opens on Saturday March 14th and plays till April 4.

More details here.

MORE ON PUBLISHING

2009-02-03T15:51:00.004+11:00

The Australian play script publishing scene is opening up a bit with more options for playwrights to place their work with a variety of publishers. for example, Verity's adaptation on THE NARGUN AND THE STARS has been published by the fabulous David Stewart at Phoenix Education. Click here for link.

australianplays.org

2009-01-27T16:12:00.005+11:00

There's a new website where you can buy copies of some of the plays and radio scripts written by 7-ON. (And other playwrights too.) Check out australianplays.org

THE NARGUN AND THE STARS

2009-01-22T09:48:00.002+11:00

I know I should have made an entry on the blog before rather than after the Sydney season of THE NARGUN AND THE STARS, but any writers out there will know just how fierce the final weeks of rehearsal can be. The complications of cutting and editing textual contributions to a highly visual show involving video, large, medium and small scale puppets, black light sequences and enormous items of set (A Nargun, a bulldozer, a tractor no less) without diluting the narrative drive are quite extreme. One was pretty stretched.

But it all came together on the night, as they say and we (by that I mean Erth Physical and Visual Theatre, the initiators, and Performing Lines, the producers, and me as adaptor and all the rest of the creative team and other workers on the show, have just had a dream opening season of NARGUN at Parramatta Riverside Theatre as part of the Sydney Festival (triple thanks to the audience on the Thursday preview...any of you out there who might stumble across this blog will know what I mean!)

Responses have included: ' The visual imagination and technical adventurousness is matched with a coherent and resonant narrative... a rare and pleasurable work that manages technical brilliance, cultural insight and enchantment in one go' - Stephen Dunne SMH 19th Jan;

'This production reaches into a realm that is all too infrequently explored. It provides a magical introduction to theatre, and to Aboriginal stories for children' Troy Lennon, Sunday Telegraph, Jan 19;

'An enchanting story no child should miss' - Sally Craig, Arts Hub, Jan 20 (NB Sally - Patricia Wrightson didn't 'adapt' her own story. There was a theatre writer who adapted her beautiful novel, namely me. It was quite hard work, as it happens, so acknowledgement is welcome when it comes.)

So now, tired but happy, the cast and crew are taking a well-earned rest before travelling to Perth for the Perth International Festival for a season in the Regal Theatre, opening on February 19th.

I have been thinking so much about how and why we make theatre, what it takes to get it right, how necessary, not to mention basic is the generosity that ensures that all partners in a creation can fully participate with their best work, the magic gift when you find there is someone there who is brave enough to 'hold the room', the necessity of developing the emotional muscles to be that person when you see it's needed, all this. The irony is I'm too tired at the moment to attempt to articulate it. So. Enuff.

Alice Dreaming

2008-12-22T11:36:00.002+11:00

Ned Manning's Alice Dreaming was performed by Mercedes College in Adelaide, South Australia and Directed by Esther Lamb.

"The play cleverly alludes to the classic tale 'Alice in Wonderland' through a similar use of anthropomorphic creatures, fantasy and political commentary. However, Manning has woven a number of contemporary Australian perspectives to his piece. This modern day Alice in Wonderland is not only a coming of age for Alice, but it also explores modern teenage cultural perspectives and concerns. Like Carrol's original commentary on the Victorian era, Manning also weaves a biting satirical commentary on our political and judicial system with a warning note on our environmental legacy".

Esther Lamb

The production was a huge success with all performances sold out and the Principal stating it was "the best play he had ever seen".

7-ON IN 2008

2008-12-21T19:37:00.002+11:00

7-ON IN 2008

Stage 1 of 7-ON’s adaptation of Nietzsche’s ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ is drawing to a close. We were proud ‘god(less!)-parents’ of the University of Wollongong Performing Arts students’ production of ‘Everyone And No-One’ – their riff on ‘Zarathustra’ via a series of ‘provocations’ provided by 7-ON in October, 2008. And we have since completed our own first draft script, that owes something of its structure to some of the discoveries we made from both our preparations for the students’ work and the whole-hearted youthful energy that they brought to their own piece.

It’s been quite a roller-coaster in that the redoubtable Professor Nietzsche is something of a hard-taskmaster. His primary aim is not necessarily to convince his readers of the truth of his take on human existence and consciousness but –more than anything else – to make them, force them, bully them into learning how to think. Writing this script has certainly been a brain-teaser in a thousand different ways, but a rather glorious one. We are now on the hunt for a dedicated development opportunity and confreres in the task of realising our collective adaptation. Watch this space.

7-ON’s second current project is to write 7 30ish minute scripts on the topic of ‘Old Texts Revisited’ as part of the ABC Audio Arts entry for the 2009/10 Prix Macula. It’s early days as the project stretches over two years but we’re researching and drafting our (as usual) 7 very different takes on the topic. So…as the offerings become more definite…watch this space

2009
As well as (hopefully) working with the State of Play collective on a piece entitled THIS ISLAND’S MINE, 7-ON has started work on a piece for the Sydney Theatre Company (very tentatively) titled ‘Persons of Interest’ or perhaps ‘Shadow Play’ or perhaps ‘Black and White’ or perhaps ‘Missing Friends’ or perhaps…hmmm (more watching of more space).

INDIVIDUAL UPDATE

Verity is currently in rehearsal for the production - by Erth Physical and Visual Theatre (http://www.erth.com.au/Erth/Home.html) and Performing Lines (http://www.performinglines.org.au/ ) - of her adaptation of Patricia Wrightson’s classic childrens’ novel THE NARGUN AND THE STARS*. The play – for actors, puppets and set – is scheduled for both the Sydney Festival (http://www.sydneyfestival.org.au)and the Perth International Festival (http://www.perthfestival.com.au/). It opens in Sydney on the 17th January at the Parramatta Riverside Theatre and in Perth at the Regal Theatre on 19th February.

*Here’s the soundbite/wordbite from the Sydney Festival web-site:

“The magical world of Patricia Wrightson’s much-loved novel comes to life on stage in a stunning visual feast, featuring ERTH’s large scale puppets, live actors and digital animation.

The story follows Simon, a boy orphaned and relocated to his distant cousins’ bush farm, where he soon meets the indigenous creatures of the land: the trickster Potkoorok, the mischievous Turongs, the cave-dwelling Nyols and the Nargun, a terrifying stone creature.

Combining visual spectacle with Wrightson’s warmth, humour and richly drawn characters, this is a story not only of adventure and discovery, but also of respect for indigenous culture, the land and its folklore.

The adaptation is informed by ERTH’s on-going consultation with the original story owners, the Gunai/Kurnai, Monaro and Boon Wurrung communities of East Gippsland.”

'The Bloody Bride' reviewed

2008-10-12T21:06:00.006+11:00

Reviews are in for NORPA'S production of Hilary Bell's 'The Bloody Bride'.

Read the RealTime Arts review.

Read the Heartbeat review.

Read the Byron Echo review.

Hilary Bell's 'The Bloody Bride'

2008-08-26T20:49:00.008+10:00

I've just returned from Lismore, where 'The Bloody Bride' played to full houses at the Star Court Theatre. For info and video click here.

Eighteen months ago, Julian Louis, NORPA's artistic director, asked me to read Lorca's 'Blood Wedding' with a view to adapting it for regional NSW. It's a sharp, hot, passionate play, repressed desire tangling with unbridled emotion and operatic gesture. It feels to have been written in a white heat. I went to Lismore on a reccy. How would this wild, Latin story transfer to laconic country Australia, particularly the Rainbow Region with its smiling hippies, its peace and plenty? Julian introduced me around. We hung out at the Winsome Hotel. We 'borrowed' Living Books from the municipal library. I'd spent the obligatory months of self-discovery at Byron in the early '90s, and had some stories of my own. I began to get a sense of darker subcurrents that would lend themselves to what is, of course, a universal story. As I started working I found the ideas moving away from the Lorca to the stage where it was no longer the basis for an adaptation, but a departure point for an original play.

There were two things I wanted to retain from 'Blood Wedding': the sexual tension of the love-triangle, and the evolvement from the opening's (relative) naturalism to the heightened, poetic lushness of the final scenes. The title having been established by Julian from the start, I would also need blood, and a bride. With these parameters, and a rough idea of our three characters, six months later we workshopped the play. The process of reciprocal generosity between actors, Julian, dramaturg Janis Balodis, and myself was nothing short of inspiring, and I worked into the night, completing the first draft in a matter of days. The year's interim saw some major changes in the script, but its form had been forged in the same 'white heat' energy so essential to Lorca's play.

We hope to tour or on-sell Julian's muscular, lyrical production. Stay posted for further developments.

ZARATHUSTRA!

2008-08-12T17:58:00.001+10:00

We’ve been a bit slack really, we seven, in keeping up with this blog. Scripts and productions have come and gone and Not Much Attention has been paid. For example, I didn’t post the re-production of Gondwana, a piece I evolved with the kool kidz at Erth (they really are cool – check out their website at http://www.erth.com.au/Home.html) for Brisbane’s Out Of The Box Festival in June this year. (It went well – the combination of 10,000 kids and a set of scary dinosaurs is INFALLIBLE. We were proud.) Nor did I flag two radio plays of mine, Davy and Moon Door, on ABC Audio Arts that were broadcast some months apart this year. These are just my sins of omission – the rest of the 7-ONers have sins of their own.

BUT we are working on an interesting 7-ON project at the moment. We received funding from the Theatre Board in the last round to develop an adaptation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. This is not necessarily an easy gig but you can see how we might be attracted to it. Upside down morality, supermen, embattled translators, the perils of conformity, the emptiness of a materialist and acquisitive culture, huge butterflies, dancing songs, soothsayers, dwarfs, dead bodies placed in trees for ravens to pick their flesh. Fantastic.

We were very keen, however, to find a way to approach the material from an initial standpoint that was performative rather than textural. So we approached the Drama Dept at the University of Wollongong to see if we could work together in a way that might serve their students’ needs as well as ours. Ultimately they will evolve their version (called All Or Nothing) and we will evolve ours (Thus Spake Zarathustra). But in the meantime they’ll take advantage of us as seven very different writers , dramaturgs and in this case provocateurs and we’ll take advantage of their bodies and minds in space (under the direction of Chris Ryan.)

The method? After some weeks of 7-ON meeting to combine our individual ideas and research we prepared a series of five templates/provocations covering Parts 1 – 4 of Thus Spake Zarathustra and a further template covering Nietzsche’s life and times. This was to evolve the basic material of both versions of the original. We have committed to three further sessions of dramaturgical input to the results of the students’ work. At the moment we are taking it in turns for a couple of us to go down to Wollongong once each week to work with Chris and the students. We’re only halfway through. It’s been so interesting. Keep you posted. VL

Magic Box

2008-07-23T19:45:00.002+10:00

"Magic Box" a new show for primary school kids developed by 7ON's Ned Manning, had a successful workshop and showing this week. "Magic Box" introduces primary school kids to the magical world of theatre using Shakespeare as a springboard. Directed by Gary Scale, "Magic Box" delighted and excited the kids at the showing. It is intended to develop the piece into a work that can tour primary schools throughout Australia.

"Shelter" in London

2008-05-02T13:20:00.004+10:00

Hilary Bell's Shelter was the second play of 7-ON's The Seven Needs which premiered at the Griffin theatre in 2007.

Now, Shelter is being produced as part of the The Miniaturists 12, directed by Lucy Skilbeck at the Arcola Theatre on the 11th May.

More details here

Vanessa Bates

2008-03-12T16:27:00.005+11:00

Checklist for An Armed Robber

Vanessa Bates writes for stage, television, film, radio and the web.

She was an Affiliate Playwright with Sydney Theatre Company and a member of the STC Blueprints Literary Program. She received a 6-month Australia council writer’s residency at the Cite des Arts in Paris in 1999 and a Varuna/Playworks Fellowship in 2001. While part of Blueprints she wrote Newton’s Cradle (short listed for the Griffin Award) and Checklist For An Armed Robber (short listed for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, the Griffin Award and the ANPC/New Dramatists Award). In 2006 she won a Theatrelab Playwrights Award for Lakes of Death and Dreamers which was workshopped with Edward Albee.

Vanessa’s plays have been produced by Vitalstatistix, Sydney Theatre Company, Belvoir St Theatre’s B Sharp, Black Swan Theatre, Tantrum Theatre, Freewheels Theatre, Shopfront Theatre, Always Working Artists and The Miniaturists (London).

Other plays include: Match, Hunger, At Sea, The Magic Hour, Darling Oscar, here is the beehive, Live By The Die, Sketches Of A Shrinking Woman, A Little Bit Each Night (short-listed for the Patrick White Playwrights’ Award) and the infamous Petunia Takes Tea.

Vanessa has also written several plays for ABC Radio including The Elephant’s Ark, Mincemeat, To Fly In The Night Air and the AWGIE Award winning adaptation of Checklist For An Armed Robber.

A writer and arts mentor with national arts company Big hART, Vanessa wrote the AWGIE nominated documentary 900 Neighbours (ABCTV/Big hART 2007). She is also the writer of atyp’s website for young playwrights: Fresh Ink.

Her first book Legs Up & Laughing was published by Murdoch Books in 2007.

Vanessa is a graduate of the NIDA Playwrights Studio.

Noëlle Janaczewska

2008-03-12T14:46:00.022+11:00

Fearless N, Theatre Kantanka, 2008. Photo: Nicholas Higgins

Noëlle Janaczewska is a Sydney-based writer of plays, radio scripts, libretti, monologues, poetry, spoken word, essays, gallery and on-line explorations. Her work has been performed, broadcast and published throughout Australia and overseas. Working across drama and non-fiction, recurring themes in her work are the history and philosophy of science, colonialism and its legacies, narratives of place and migration, and the exploration of language/s.

A graduate of Oxford and London Universities, Noëlle worked with and co-established several theatre companies and contemporary arts groups, presenting work in Britain, Germany and The Netherlands, before moving to Australia in the late 1980s. Following 2 years as the Artistic Director of The Performance Space in Sydney, she returned to freelance practice with The History of Water/Huyền Thoại Một Giòng Nước, first produced by the Sydney Theatre Company in 1992, and published by Currency Press in 1995, following productions in London and Canada, Germany and Vietnam.

Noëlle’s numerous nominations, grants and prizes include the 2006 Queensland Premier's Literary Award (Drama Script, Stage) for Mrs Petrov's Shoe (Theatre @ Risk, 2006). Her play Songket, produced by the Griffin Theatre Company and The Studio at the Sydney Opera House to a sell-out season in 2003, won the 2002 Griffin Playwriting Award and the 2001 Playbox Asialink Playwriting Competition. The recipient of a Centenary Medal for radio scriptwriting, an Asialink Literature Residency in Korea, and Fellowships from Varuna Writers' Centre and the Theatre and Literature Boards of the Australia Council. Noëlle’s radio features There's Something About Eels ... and Let’s Go Brazil won AWGIE Awards in 2009 and 2006, as did her radio dramas The Rush Hour Carillon, Glissando 24 and Slowianska Street in 2005, 2001 and 1999. In 1997, she obtained her doctorate from the University of Technology, Sydney.

Recent works include Random Red and Weeds Etc for ABC Radio National in 2011 and 2010 respectively, Eyewitness Blues for the BBC, The Hannah First Collection, 1919—1949 for the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai, Taishō Chick (Art Gallery of NSW, 2008), Fearless N (Theatre Kantanka/Sydney Olympic Park, 2008), the Movie Extra Award-winning short Duet With A Dictionary (Short & Sweet 2008, Movie Extra 2008), Unrequited (Adelaide Festival Centre OzAsia Festival 2007) and This Territory, produced by the Australian Theatre for Young People in association with the Powerhouse Youth Theatre and the Sydney Opera House in 2007. In 2008 Currency Press published This Territory and Songket in a 2-play edition.

Alongside works for stage and radio, Noëlle has published poems, essays, monologues, flash fiction, reviews and other short pieces in many anthologies, literary journals, newspapers and on-line magazines, including: Jacket, Cordite, extempore, Island, Scan, HEAT, Southerly, Imago, Voices, RePublica and The Weekend Australian. The poems she wrote for Kathryn Millard's film Travelling Light feature on the soundtrack CD, produced by the ABC & Universal Music Australia, and in 2006 Wayzgoose Press published her long poem Dorothy Lamour's Life as a Phrasebook.

Find out more about her work, and read excerpts, essays and poetry at http://noelle-janaczewska.com

Noëlle is represented by Cameron Creswell. Contact them at info@cameronsmanagement.com.au

Catherine Zimdahl

2008-03-12T10:04:00.004+11:00

Clark in Sarajevo

Catherine Zimdahl is a playwright, screenwriter and visual artist.

Her credits include the plays Clark In Sarajevo, Family Running For Mr Whippy, Wharf At Woolloomooloo, A Day Too Great, the children’s play The Rocky Road to Riches ( the Australian Museum 1995), and the adaptation of the classic novel Moonfleet (Windmill National Children’s Theatre and Mainstreet Theatre Company 2004). Her radio credits include A World Into A Child, A Child Into the World (2003) and also the adaptations of Clark In Sarajevo(2001), Family Running For Mr Whippy (1995).

Catherine is a graduate of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in Screenwriting and while there wrote the short features Sparks and Life On Earth As I Know It. In 1990 Sparks received Australian Film Institute awards for Best Short Film and Best Short Screenplay, the Gold Plaque Award from Chicago International Film Festival and Le Prix Recherche from the Clermont Ferrand Film Festival. Sparks and Life On Earth As I Know It have both been screened on Channel 4 and at numerous festivals.

Her screenplay Wharf At Woolloomooloo was nominated for the Lexus If Awards Best Unproduced Screenplay in 2004. Her film script The Ego Trip is currently in development.

Donna Abela

2008-03-12T09:19:00.008+11:00

Tales From The Arabian Nights

Donna Abela has written for audiences of all ages, collaborating across a range of performance genres to write over twenty works.

Her credits include The Greatest Show On Earth (Queensland Music Festival), Tales From the Arabian Nights (Kim Carpenter’s Theatre of Image), The Daphne Massacre (Parramatta Riverside Theatres), Fathom (ABC Radio), Highest Mountain Fastest River (Salamanca Theatre Company), Quest (Pact Youth Theatre), One In A Million (Death Defying Theatre), Circus Caravan and 4 Speed Blenders (Jigsaw Theatre Company), and No Funny Business, More Funny Business, and Lots More Funny Business for the New Theatre.

For Powerhouse Youth Theatre, a company she co-founded in Western Sydney in 1987, and chaired between 1994 and 2003, Donna wrote a number of scripts, including: Reek Havoc, 15 Seconds Later, Shazam, Ratbags and Was Liverpool Always Full of Headbangers?

Donna has extensive experience as a dramaturge, script assessor, teacher and arts administrator, and in 2002, was the Acting Artistic Director of Playworks, the Women Performance Writers’ Network.

She is a recognised cross-cultural practitioner, and has been a writer-in-residence a number times, including with the Sydney Theatre Company, where she was an affiliate writer in 1992-93.

Verity Laughton

2008-03-12T08:26:00.012+11:00

The Snow Queen

Verity Laughton has written for most forms of theatre including mainstage adult drama, a promenade community event, a musical, plays for child and family audiences, as well as for dance, for puppets, for theatre of image and a ‘neutral script’.

Her plays include The Lightkeeper (Mainstreet Theatre Company and national tour; winner of the 2004 AWGIE for Community & Youth Theatre), The Snow Queen (Windmill Performing Arts), Burning (Griffin Theatre Company and winner of the 2001 Griffin Playwriting Award), Carrying Light (State Theatre of South Australia and Vitalstatistix; winner of the Adelaide Critics Circle Best New South Australian play, 1999) and The Mourning After (Playbox Theatre, 1995/6, Interplay Productions, New Zealand, 2000, and the Riverina Theatre, 2001).

In other writing, Verity’s radio play Fox for ABC Radio National won the 2004 AWGIE for Best Radio Play. She has also written for television and video. She worked as dramaturg on a Japanese-Australian co-production, World of Paper (Hello Maru-Chan), restaged in Australia, in the USA at the Kennedy Centre in Washington in 2006, and at London’s Unicorn Theatre in 2007.

A recent work for puppets was Gondwana, for Erth Visual and Physical Theatre at the National Museum, Canberra, in September 2005. Gondwana was re-staged in New Zealand and Sydney in 2008.A recent play is Sweet Thing (runner-up Griffin Prize, 2006, Rodney Seaborn Prize 2007 and long-listed for the London Warehouse Theatre's International Playwriting Festival, 2007). Her most recent large scale production was a puppetry adaptation of Patricia Wrightson's The Nargun and the Stars, produced by Erth Physical and Visual and Performing Lines for the Sydney and Perth International Arts Festivals (published by Phoenix Educational and nominated for the Sydney Theatre Awards). Her current play The Ice Season won the 2009 Inscription Open Award.

Verity is represented by Anthony Blair at
Cameron Creswell Management.
7th Floor, 61 Marlborough Street
Surry Hills
NSW 2010

Tel +61 2 93197199
Fax +61 2 93196866

Ned Manning interviewed in The Guardian Weekly

2008-03-10T22:55:00.002+11:00

Ned grew up in rural Australia. His first wife was Aboriginal, and their children grew up strongly identifying with the indigenous community. Ned wrote two plays about the stolen generation, touring them with indigenous theatre groups.
Read Ned's interview in the Guardian Weekly.

Hilary Bell

2008-03-10T20:35:00.011+11:00

Wolf Lullaby

Hilary writes for stage, radio, screen and music theatre. Her plays have been produced in Australia, the UK, Europe and the United States. Plays include Wolf Lullaby (Jill Blewitt Playwrights' Award; national tour; international productions), Fortune (HSC curriculum), The Eye of the Storm (Eric Kocher Award, USA), The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Ruysch (AWGIE for music theatre), The Falls (Bug'n'Bub Award, USA), Memmie Le Blanc (Inscription Award) and The Bloody Bride.

Her radio plays—Wreckage, Cruisin’, Is It You?, The Claimant and radio adaptations of Doctor Ruysch and Wolf Lullaby—were commissioned and produced by the ABC. She has written libretti for musicals (The Wedding Song, comp. Stephen Rae), song cycles (Talk Show, comp. Elena Kats-Chernin), opera (Mrs. Satan, comp. Victoria Bond) and for Phillip Johnston’s score to Murnau’s silent film Faust.

Current projects include a screenplay of Alex Miller's novel Journey to the Stone Country, a musical about Cole's Funny Picture Books called Do Good And You Will Be Happy, Perfect Stranger for Yale Repertory Theatre, The White Divers of Broome for Black Swan, and a play for the students at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts. She is also collaborating with designer Gaelle Mellis on Take Up Thy Bed And Walk (working title).

Hilary is a recipient of the Philip Parsons Young Playwright's Award and an Aurealis Award for fiction. She is a graduate of New York's Juilliard Playwrights’ Studio, Australia's National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) and the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. She was the 2003-04 Tennessee Williams Fellow at the University of the South, Tennessee. She has taught dramatic writing at New York University and Wesleyan University (US), and currently teaches playwriting for the Griffin Theatre.

Hilary is represented by RGM Associates

PO Box 128, Surry Hills NSW 2010

Tel. 612 9281 3911

Hilary's plays can be purchased via Currency Press (Fortune, Wolf Lullaby);The Australian Script Centre (The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Ruysch, Conversations With Jesus, Memmie Le Blanc, The Falls, The Seven Needs); and by direct email for everything else: Email Hilary Bell

AWARDS; FELLOWSHIPS

Inscription Award for 'Memmie Le Blanc' 2007

Tennessee Williams Fellowship, University of the South, Tennessee, USA 2003-2004

Music Theatre AWGIE (Australian Writers Guild) ‘The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Ruysch’ 2003

Bug’n’Bub Award for ‘The Falls’, UA 2001

ASK Theatre Projects Writers Retreat, USA 2000

Susan Smith Blackburn Award finalist, 1999

Hegebrook Writers’ Colony, USA1998

Juilliard Playwright Fellow, USA 1997 and 1998

LeCompte du Nouy Award, USA 997 and 1998

Eric Kocher Award, USA 1997

Jill Blewett Playwrights' Award, 1996

Aurealis Award for Young Adult Fiction, 1996

Philip Parsons Memorial Young Playwrights’ Award, 1994

Hilary's work has been developed through the Australian National Playwrights' Conference, 1994 & 2006; the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights' Conference, USA, 1997 & 1999; and the Russian Playwrights' Conference, 1997.

Ned Manning

2008-03-09T15:41:00.005+11:00

Last One Standing

Ned Manning is a playwright, actor and teacher. He has written eighteen plays all of which have had a production.

His first play, Us or Them, began its life as a co-op, first in Canberra and then at the Griffin Theatre Company. Us or Them’s critical and box office success led to it being the first professional production done by the company. It went on to be produced around Australia and published by Currency Press.

Kenny’s Coming Home, a satire about the Labor Party, was done at the Q Theatre in Penrith.

Milo also began its life as a co-op before being picked up by a number of companies and being published by Currency.
Ned has written two plays about the Stolen Generations, Close to the Bone and Luck of the Draw. Both are published by Currency and have had numerous productions around Australia and overseas.

His latest play for adults is Last One Standing which he acted in as well as producing.

Ned has written many plays for young people. His latest being Alice Dreaming. He is currently commissioned by the Bell Shakespeare Company to write their Actors at Work scripts. He has written nine short plays for the Company.

He is currently working on a number of projects with 7-ON as well as his own projects.

He teaches at Newtown High School of the Performing Arts.

The Uninvited Voice published in Brand Magazine

2008-02-19T23:40:00.002+11:00

Donna's short play, The Uninvited Voice, will be published in the second edition of Brand magazine. Brand is published by the Creative Writing Programme at the University of Greenwich, UK, and is dedicated to experimental stories, plays, poems and creative non-fiction. This edition will be launched 6pm on Sunday 24th of February at The Langley in Covent Garden, so if you're in the area...

Writing Comedy

2008-02-09T16:19:00.000+11:00

Steve Kaplan taught his Comedy Intensive in Sydney last August. Inscription sent Hilary Bell along to report. Read her article,
or find out more about Inscription.

Stephen Jeffreys on Playwriting

2008-02-09T15:57:00.000+11:00

Hilary Bell's play 'Memmie Le Blanc' won the 2007 Inscription Award, which included a workshop with English playwright Stephen Jeffreys ('The Libertine', 'Art of War'). She wrote an article about her experience, which gives a broad overview of Stephen's insights into the art and craft of playwriting. Read the article

MEMMIE LE BLANC at the Adelaide Fringe Festival

2008-01-25T22:27:00.005+11:00

If you missed it in Perth, you can catch it in Adelaide. "Memmie Le Blanc" previews on February 15, and runs from the 16th through til March 8th. It's on at the Queens Theatre, Playhouse Lane, Adelaide.

For more information

SCRIPT NOW AVAILABLE!
Only $12!
Discount given for bulk orders.
Email Hilary Bell.

Conspirators

2008-01-19T15:44:00.000+11:00

Rehearsals begin on Monday 21st January for Bell Shakespeare's Actors at Work shows for 2008. Written by 7ON's Ned Manning, AAW plays to over 60,000 school students throughout Australia. Ned has been commissioned to write AAW scripts since 2005 and has now written eight 45 minute plays for the Company. Seven of these plays are now in Repertory and will be programmed depending on the needs of teachers and students. A new play, Conspirators, has been written by Ned and will be seen for the first time this year. Conspirators brings together Othello and Julius Caesar and focuses on the notion of political and personal conspiracy. Issues such as bullying and peer group pressure are woven into a discussion of text, language and Shakespeare's world.

2 of 7-ON @ Sydney Short & Sweet 2008

2008-01-17T14:38:00.001+11:00

AT SEA by Vanessa Bates and DUET WITH A DICTIONARY by Noëlle Janaczewska are both being produced as part of the Short & Sweet 2008 program at the Seymour Centre in Sydney. DUET WITH A DICTIONARY is directed by Jessica Tuckwell, and AT SEA by Danielle O’Keefe. AT SEA is in Week 5, from 12-16 February. DUET WITH A DICTIONARY is in the Short & Sweet 2008 Gala Final at the Seymour Centre in Sydney on the 22 and 23 February. It was the judges’ choice from the Seymour’s Week 3 program.

For more information and bookings go to Short & Sweet.

AT SEA also has its UK debut, directed by Lucy Skilbeck, on 3 February as a part of Miniaturists 11.

DUET WITH A DICTIONARY won the Movie Extra Award at the Gala Final of Short & Sweet Sydney 2008.

'Memmie Le Blanc' reviewed

2007-11-28T07:06:00.002+11:00

The co-production between Perth's Deckchair Theatre and Adelaide's Vitalstatistix of Hilary Bell's play 'Memmie Le Blanc' has received unanimously good notices from critics. See information on the production, and read reviews (at the bottom of the page).

Read Jonathan Marshall's Realtime review.

Read Barry Lenny's Rip It Up review.

To see more photos of the production, click here.

The Next Need!

2007-10-29T14:14:00.000+11:00

We've had Food (Hunger'), Shelter, Sex (Left Breathless A Question'), Safety (F.R.G.S'), Belonging...

Now we are up to the sixth of the Seven Needs.

On Tuesday 6th November at Griffin Theatre, immediately before Katherine Thomson's latest play, 'King Tide', Verity Laughton's 'Respect' will be performed by Annie Byron, Pip Miller and Kate Mulvaney, directed by Geordie Brookman.

This is the scenario. An wheelchair-bound elderly woman has elicited the help of a touchy no-hoper to enable her to climb the Great Wall of China just once before she dies. What happens next?

Two plays for the price of one. Come along!

Interview with Hilary

2007-10-27T11:21:00.000+10:00

Read an interview with Hilary Bell discussing her new play Memmie Le Blanc, 7-ON, and the play-writing life ...

Seven Needs Postscript

2007-10-15T09:06:00.000+10:00

Read a commentary/review of F.R.G.S., the fourth of our Seven Needs, at echprasis

Outback's Top Brass

2007-07-24T13:48:00.000+10:00

As part of the Queensland Music Festival, for three chilly evenings The Greatest Show on Earth was performed in Longreach, an extraordinary production, not just because it featured 20 horses, amateur boxers, a choir, a quartet and three sets of musicians from the beginner to the seasoned professional, but because of the philosophy behind its creation...

To read the full article about Donna's latest show go to Outback's top brass

National Script Workshop

2007-07-11T15:36:00.000+10:00

I've been in the deep colds of Canberra at the first ever National Script Workshop, run by Playwriting Australia, the body created out of the ashes of the Australian National Playwrights' Centre and Playworks. I think most of the members of 7ON have been part of either or both of those organisations. Most of us have also had strong opinions on the death of those bodies and the birth of the new one.

So there was a certain amount of nostalgia in being closeted at the scene of innumerable Playwrights' Conferences, namely Burgmann College at the Australian National University for the first week (when the full team of writers, directors, dramaturgs and actors were all present) and a certain amount of sheer relief at finally making it to hotel accomodation at Rydge's in the centre of town for the second week(when the actors left us).

Well, I ain't passing on any gossip courtesy of the world wide web, but persons were seen to enjoy themselves in between the obligatory hard working. The process is so intense it's unsurprising.

I worked on my play, SWEET THING, with director, Wesley Enoch and dramaturg, Louise Gough and the seven actors needed for my moody, time-fluid, sub-text-ridden play. "My' actors were Ursula Yovich, Judy Farr, Russell Dykstra, George Shevstov, Ansuya Nathan, Kate Roberts and Toby Schmidt.

SWEET THING had already had a reading aa part of the Griffin Theatre Searchlights Season a few weeks ago so I have had the luxury of hearing my work read by not just one but two - fairly different - groups of actors, followed by quite a lot of input from the second group in particular (as well as wonderful director and dramaturg).

I'd gone to the Script Workshop feeling that my play had its form already, but wanting to test that form. Usually I write to a loose plan, then discard the plan as I write. But I do have one to discard. With the writing of SWEET THING I stepped off the end of the jetty and tried to see if I could swim (the metaphor's mixed but appropriate if you know the play...) So this particular play has evolved quite slowly, and entirely intuitively, and each part links to the other more like a map of a psychology (mine, which is scary...)than like a formal piece of dramatic writing. So it did need testing, and I tried to be open to that process.

I'm only just back home to Sydney after another digression over to Adelaide so I'm still in flux about the actual work I've done. I've added a scene, swapped another round and fine-tuned both my words and my thinking.

The main problem - I'm still wrestling with it - is a key scene when the three sisters of the play are smallish children on a beach in South Australia. The scene is, I know, essential, but it's not earning its way as anything other than illustration of their characters at this stage. And the added scene - which I'm pretty keen on - may well have to go again. And what to do with what I've discovered when writing it?

The writing life. Hmmm.

In other work, GONDWANA, a previous piece with Erth Physical and Visual Theatre, is currently enjoying a sold out season in Sydney, despite a compromised venue that I must say had me really nervous ahead of time. The success of the show, however, only goes to show that I am not the only person in the world who has remained in love with dinosaurs. (GONDWANA is about the formation of the land mass of Gondwana and in particular the time from the late Triassic to the late Cretaceous Periods when dinosaurs were really big and really mean.It's been an evolving labour of love with Erth. The good thing about it is that an entire population of new dinosaur fans gets born every three or so years. It could tour forever...)

Next week I go into a Creative Development, also with Erth on a production of my adaptation of Patricia Wrightson's classic novel for children, THE NARGUN AND THE STARS. It's a beautiful project to work on, apart from access to truly enormous puppets, because Wrightson's own writing is so extraordinarily clever. She has shaped her world through her style, a rare accomplishment in these days of strictly narrative driven fantasy writing for children. Part of my task, as adaptor, is to honour both the style, and the effect of it on place and character in this new, dramatic form.

But I'm not thinking about that right now.

I have two days, four if I count the weekend, to crack that beach scene.

Adios.

Verity

The Greatest Show On Earth

2007-06-27T17:59:00.000+10:00

Donna Abela has been working with a creative team spread across three states to develop the script for The Greatest Show On Earth, a musical adventure that pitches big smoke developers against a community determined to protect their heritage and tradition. It’s a rough and tumble story inspired by the generations of circuses and carnivals that travelled through outback Australia.
The show features the Longreach Town Brass Band, The Thistle Pipe Band, the Call of Fame Quartet and a local Choir, and a contingent of professional actors and musicians. It will play in the showground of Longreach in central Queensland on the 19th, 20th and 21st of July.
Co-written with director Patrick Nolan, the show was commissioned by the Queensland Music Festival.

World Premiere

2007-06-25T10:11:00.000+10:00

Hilary Bell's new play 'Memmie Le Blanc' is to be produced by Deckchair Theatre in November 2007. Commissioned by Los Angeles theatre South Coast Rep, workshopped at the 2006 Australian National Playwrights' Conference, and recently awarded the Inscription prize, 'Memmie' is inspired by the true story of a feral child found in the woods of France in 1731.
Deckchair will join forces with Vitalstatistix, guaranteeing a tour to Adelaide in 2008. For more information go to: Deckchair Theatre

SMH Article

2007-04-28T16:10:00.000+10:00

Click here to read the full Sydney Morning Herald interview (7.12.06) with Griffin Artistic Director Nick Marchand on the 2007 season including the genesis of the 7-Needs For 7-ON project.

"...He says The Seven Needs, a series of 10-minute plays that will be performed throughout the year, came about after a conversation with the playwright Hilary Bell. "She mentioned 7-ON and the ideas behind them as a collective, then happened to mention that they were working on a larger work together," he says.

"It's something I'm always intrigued by. I've worked as a playwright with [others] and there's something really exciting about that opportunity to write collaboratively - to be writing individually but also to have that larger umbrella idea that resolves the disparate parts. When they suggested it, and I saw the playwrights involved, I thought it was a wonderful way to draw on their individual energies."

The first project: 7-Needs For 7-ON

2007-04-28T15:55:00.000+10:00

On Wednesday December 6th 2006, Nick Marchand, Artistic Director of the Griffin Theatre, launched the 2007 program. Along with the other exciting new Australian plays was 7-Needs. This project incorporates 7 ten minute pieces scattered throughout the year with a final production that brings all 7 together.

7-ON Playwright Verity Laughton made the following speech to introduce both the plays and the group.

"We’re a group of seven people writing primarily for theatre. We’re all based in NSW. Between us we’ve had more than 147 pieces of writing produced for mainstage drama, television, radio, community theatre, theatre for young people, youth theatre, dance, video, film, puppetry, theatre of image, physical theatre, and musicals; we’ve won more than 30 awards between us, our time in the business adds up to 126 years and our work has been produced in fifteen countries.

So we’re claiming provenance.

We’re a group of very different writers. We don’t think or act or write much like each other. But, in these tough times, we’ve decided to make a commitment to each others’ art and to each others’ careers.We got together towards the end of 2005.

We put together a credo. We have seven points to our credo.

It’d take too long to read it now but there are seven points to it and they are in shorthand as follows:
We want a space in the theatre environment for writer-initiated projects, and we want to place the writer at the centre of that space.

We want – not readings, workshops, script development programs but – productions. Seven of them. At least. On stage.

We want to choose our collaborators.

We claim the risk-taker’s right to fail.

We want diversity – of form, style and subject matter.

And lastly, what people see shapes their vision of what is possible. This is an extraordinary opportunity, and responsibility, for a playwright. We’re claiming it.

7 NEEDS FOR 7 ON is based on Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs. Maslow was a twentieth century psychologist who believed that basic needs must be met before human beings can evolve. He devised a hierarchy of human needs that are physiological. social and lastly, spiritual. They can be tabulated in a number of ways.

For our purposes we have separated them into seven.We sat around a table at the Old Fitz (we meet every six or so weeks in a different theatre foyer – watch our for a theatre near you!) and pulled small scraps of paper with the following ‘needs’ written on them out of the nearest thing we could find to a hat – namely a rather well-used plastic bag. We then wrote a ten minute piece based on that need – they are food, shelter, sex, safety, belonging, respect, and spirit. We could write what we wanted – believe me, the results are all VERY different.

They are going to be staged one by one throughout 2007, culminating with a final staging of the whole lot together. Come along for the ride!"

Our Credo

2007-04-28T15:50:00.000+10:00

1.Our commitment is twofold: to ensuring a space for writer-initiated projects; and to placing the writer at the centre of that theatrical process.

2.Nothing beats production.Readings, workshops and script development programs are no substitute. We believe the best way to foster new work, keep writing skills supple, and continue to develop as playwrights, is to see our work translated from page to stage, and before an audience.

3.We are our own gatekeepers.Who decides which plays get produced? Artistic directors, directors, literary managers, company administrators or general managers … never it seems, playwrights. Even in those companies who brand themselves ‘writers’ theatres’ programming decisions are not made by playwrights. We want to put playwrights not only centre-stage, but in the program-decider’s chair.

4.We are our own artistic directors.In an enterprise of risk, where the prime responsibility for success or failure will be sheeted to the writer, playwrights must have the right to choose their own collaborators, that is, directors, designers, actors, musicians.

5.We actively encourage risk, dramatic audacity and creative ambition. While we hope and strive for success, we claim the right to fail. The nature of risk is such that failure stalks it at every turn and keystroke.

6.Theatrical adventure can come in many forms and guises. We value the whole spectrum of playwriting, from traditional storytelling to bracing experimentation. The greater the diversity of styles, forms, and subject matter, the healthier our theatre industry.

7.What people see shapes their vision of what is possible.This is an extraordinary opportunity, and responsibility, for a playwright. It offers the potential to reinvent our art, our industry, and the world we live in. In order to be part of a substantial positive change, we must build audiences; to do so, above all else we must support our artists.