Australian Plays

Paul Fletcher, Federal Arts Minister

Adrian Collette, CEO Australia Council for the Arts

We write to express our profound shock and dismay at the recent news concerning Australian Plays, and the rejection of its EOI for operational funding. 

The implosion of PlayWriting Australia has been devastating enough – but to learn that we are now to lose the only other organisation in the country dedicated to the support of playwrights is a crippling blow. 

Australian Plays is completely unique in terms of the services it provides. It promotes the work of local playwrights, both nationally and globally, by making scripts accessible digitally. It licenses plays. It is a living archive – an essential thing in an art form that is by nature ephemeral. It makes our writing accessible to actors and directors, teachers and students, professional and amateur companies, schools and universities. It means the work of Australian playwrights gets read, produced, remounted, studied. By cutting off all support for the promotion and publication of new work, playwrights – and thus Australian theatre – simply cannot survive.

7-ON is a company of established playwrights, working both individually and collaboratively. Each of us has been part of the Australian theatre landscape for over thirty years. Carving out a career as a playwright is a tough gig, and somehow we have all managed to sustain ourselves over the years – thanks in no small part to the efforts of Australian Plays. But never before have we felt such despair for the future of our art-form and our industry.

The Australia Council and the federal government need to understand that both the playwriting community and the small-to-medium sector are in major crisis through no fault of their own, and that high-level interventions are urgently needed before cultural expertise and corporate knowledge, not to mention jobs, are lost to this generation of theatre-makers. 

7-ON

Vanessa Bates, Donna Abela, Hilary Bell*, Verity Laughton, Ned Manning, Noëlle Janaczewska, Catherine Zimdahl.

*Hilary Bell is on the board of Australian Plays.

We encourage people to write to the Federal Arts Minister and the CEO of the Australia Council to express your concerns.