Women Playwrights, Again and More

You may remember back in August of 2011 7-ON was involved in a 'Solutions Roundtable' funded by the Australia Council to debate/ thrash out/interrogate the ongoing lack of representation of female playwrights in Australian stages.

The Roundtable (along with a previous Women Directors' Forum) led to a review of the dilemma headed up by researcher Elaine Lally.

When the Review was released it made front page news in the Sydney Morning Herald, plus a good article in The Age. There's been nothing further in the newspapers since - though we understand that it is possible there may be - but the Review itself makes interesting reading, and sets a pattern for action to take into the future. We hope it will mean that a real commitment to supporting the work of women playwrights equally with their male peers may - at last - happen.

You can find the Review on the OzCo website here.

It includes a link to a survey that will remain live for about 3 weeks, in order to capture the sector’s responses to the report. This will help inform next steps. It can be found here.

The following links should take you to the newspaper articles mentioned above.

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/stage/australia-council-finds-women-are-bit-players-in-theatres-feudal-system-20120423-1xhjy.html

There is also a follow-up article on page 9: 

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/theatre/struggling-to-break-out-of-a-holding-pattern-20120423-1xh59.html

It’s also on Page 5 of The Age:

http://www.theage.com.au/national/offstage-women-run-second-20120423-1xhc4.html

Further news is that all of the theatre MPAB companies and Theatre Key Organisations are now using the Creating Pathways reporting guide (loosely based on the EOWA reporting mechanism) to identify opportunities being provided or promoted to women directors and playwrights. It’s retrospective reporting, so the first data will be collected in February 2013. The OzCo has also set up an Action Learning initiative, that may benefit some women creative leaders.

Over the backyard fence and onto the world stage

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.

Women playwrights-again

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

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?