7-ON: GLOBAL DOMINATION

Well, not quite. Not yet. But it's been a big couple of weeks for the 7s in terms of industry recognition.

Working alphabetically, first up we celebrate Donna Abela. She has been working long and hard on ‘Monkey - Journey to the West’, he of the Chinese folktale (familiar from the fabulous ‘70s TV series) with Theatre of Image and Bell Shakespeare. Shows are lined up for 2014 in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. A recent workshop produced this clip, featuring team9lives and the inimitable Darren Gilshenan as Pigsy.

Abela and Bates create a nice alphabetical segue to Triumph #2: Both Donna and Vanessa have plays shortlisted for the Griffin Award, to be announced June 14. They nestle amongst a constellation of other wonderful playwrights Robert Reid, Kate Mulvany and Rosemary Johns. Congrats to all.

The prodigious Bates is also one of the three recipients – along with Patricia Cornelius and Aiden Fennessy – of a coveted spot at Playwriting Australia’s National Script Workshop. Starting this week and running till the end of next week, she is developing her new play ‘Chipper’.

Bell is on the shortlist for Inscription’s Edward Albee Playwriting Scholarship, which I (Hilary here) am very proud to be on with two of my former students, Alison Rooke and Ruth Melville. Winner goes to New York for a month and writes a play!

Janaczewska's play ''Third Person' opens in Melbourne, at the Union House Theatre, next Wednesday, in addition to which, 'Mrs Petrov's Shoe' has just been published by Playlab.

Manning's 'Women Of Troy' will be broadcast on May 21, having been selected for the International Festival of Radio Plays Prix Marulic 2013.

And Zimdahl, our multi-talent, has been selected as a finalist for the international Clifton Art Prize. See her beautiful painting ‘A Tear Magnified to the Power’ here: 

Stay tuned for the outcomes.

On another note, I thought it worth noting just how many Australian plays are on in Sydney as I type this. Upstairs at Belvoir is Tom Holloway’s ‘Forget Me Not’, and downstairs Lally Katz’s ‘Stories I Want To Tell You In Person’. Griffin, the stalwart champion of new local work, is presenting Van Badham’s ‘The Bull, The Moon and the Coronet of Stars’. There’s the MayDay Playwrights’ Festival at the Tap Gallery (last week was wall-to-wall 7-ON).The Ensemble has just opened David Williamson’s ‘Happiness’, and TRS, ‘The Removalists’. At the Sydney Theatre Company is Joanna Murray-Smith’s ‘Fury’. These are what I can think of without resorting to Google. Anything else I should mention? Drop us a comment. And feel free to open it up to the nation at large: what else is on out there? It’s pretty bloody fantastic to see our own stories, told by our own playwrights, on so many stages all at once.

Restore Funding to ABC Radio Drama

Here is our petition to the Minster of the Arts.

www.change.org/petitions/restore-funding-to-abc-radio-drama

The Bottom Line is the End of ABC Radio Drama

Noelle and I won AWGIE Awards this year for radio drama. I began my speech by paying tribute to the 17 radio writers who 50 years ago banded together to form the Australian Writers' Guild. I then looked into the sea of glammed up producers and artists and made a simple declaration - I love writing for radio. 

If I cast my mind back over the 25 years in which I have been writing for performance, radio drama looms large. Long before I began writing for the medium, I would (don't laugh) sticky tape my transistor radio to the handle bars of my mountain bike and ride out among the apple orchards listening to the Sunday radio play. I never missed it. To this day, I can still see in my mind's eye characters as diverse as war vets and comatose patients and hitchhiking blowflies in weekly dramas written by Australian writers. Sometimes, an Australian theatre piece would be adapted, and I was able to experience first hand a play that would never receive a production in New South Wales. In this way, I supplemented my study of our national catchment of playwrights, and learned, in due course, to join their ranks. 

In a breath-taking break with its own history and tradition, ABC Radio has decided to cut radio drama from their schedule. The programme dedicated to this artform, Airplay, will be axed. Listener numbers are down, apparently, but what is meant by "down"? When I first wrote for radio I was told the average weekly audience for radio drama was 45,000; a new Australian play, especially one that has found a home not on a mainstream stage, will reach an audience of a few thousand, so that's not a bad hit rate. In fact, that's massive exposure, and a major contribution to the development of our profession and national imagination. Just think what listener numbers could be if radio drama was available as a podcast.

Word on the street indicates that Airplay (and other language-loving programmes such as The Book Reading and Lingua Franca) will be replaced by hybrid doco/dramas, improvised drama, and listener-made programs. That is, by programs that dispense with professional performance writers, and downgrade their craft and skill and status. Jobs will be lost. The chance to build a body of creative work in this medium will be lost. Audience access to a national storytelling and performance platform will be lost. And a career pathway that has always admitted creative women in great numbers will be lost. 

The decision, we are told, is all about the bottom line. But it's a decision more about an appalling and lamentable lack of will and vision to revitalise and reposition an important artform that has been an ABC staple for at least 80 years. The ABC is due a radio drama format revamp, but no, the baby is instead going out with the bathwater. 

I love writing for radio. I've only ever thought of it as an artform in its own right. One that exercises specific dramaturgical muscles and creates intimate and powerful experiences that often live long and richly in the mind's eye and imagination. But incredibly, depressingly, funded radio drama, my artistic practice in this medium, and quite probably the AWGIE Award radio drama categories, may soon be bulldozed from our national landscape.

Donna