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In: Theatre

After more than three decades of involvement, I have recently stepped away from my role with JUTE Theatre Company. JUTE has been a significant part of my professional life. As a founding member, former Board Chair, long-time artistic contributor, conference runner, Playwright Development program manager, and most recently Senior Creative Producer, for seven years full-time, I’ve had the privilege of working alongside extraordinary artists, staff, board members and community partners to build work that reflects the complexity and creativity of our region. Together with my JUTE colleagues, I developed pathways for emerging artists, supported new writing, created models to boost diverse voices in our productions,Read More →

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In: Collaboration, New Work Creation, Playwriting, Theatre, Writing

You hear a good story. It fires you up thinking about how that story would look on a stage. The story is coming from someone who has a very different culture to your own. Stop, stop, traffic light. Before you walk away saying (low key sanctimoniously) ‘this is not my story to tell, I have no business here’, I want to consider if there might be a collaborative opportunity. Ok, sure, I’ve been outspoken here before about leaving the stories of under-represented cultures alone. I stand by this. One or two celebrated Australian playwrights I could name have embarked on telling stories belonging entirely toRead More →

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In: Plays, Playwriting, Theatre, Writing

Photo by Angelina Litvin on Unsplash I do a lot of work with people new to playwriting. They are so ’emerging’ as to be absolute beginners. Theatre companies don’t normally encourage absolute beginners but mine does. We encourage it because we recognise that only paying attention to ‘established playwrights’ is a surefire way to exclude diversity, eschew community relevant stories, and support pale, stale and elitist theatre. So in my work I see great stacks of freshly minted scripts by hopeful new playwrights, mostly by early career playwrights. There’s are a few novice playwriting habits that regularly come up and I just need to pointRead More →

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In: Politics, Theatre, Writing

The biennial Tropical Writer’s Festival was held the other weekend in Cairns amid a great wrangle of words, bruised keyboards and wriggling pens. After Richard Flanagan’s recent blistering article regarding the recent bothersome nature of ‘safe’ Australian Writer’s Festivals, we were bracing for a few more verbal assaults on the topic of writers actually having an opinion at a writer’s festival. There was some keen debate, for sure. And so there should be. But as forums for public debate and discussion vanish throughout the country, … the importance of community events like writers’ festivals only grows in importance. They should not answer either to theRead More →

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In: Plays, Theatre, Writing

You’d be forgiven for thinking us playwrights have run short on ideas, and our desperate idle fingers are grasping toward our bedside table book stacks for inspiration. Popular books being adapted to stage plays is simply all the rage.  Have playwrights run out of ideas? Definitely not. There is something to it though, clearly.Read More →

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In: Playwriting, Theatre, Writing

A weird but inescapable fact— making theatre is to cause a huge group of artists with a huge variety of skills and creative drives to come together to produce a single, comprehensive, cohesive piece of art.  It’s a miracle that not more blood is spilt over it.Read More →

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In: Playwriting, Politics, Theatre, Writing

  The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation. — Stella Adler I was reading an article about the 2014 film “Selma”, a Black rights film. The director was saying that the release of his film could not have been more timely, with the latest round of civil unrest regarding violence against black people in America. The Black Lives Matter movement had by then caught the attention of American and world media. He did not claim to have designed the film to coincide with the tumult,Read More →

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In: Dramaturgy, Playwriting, Theatre, Uncategorized, Writing

“One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.” —Anton Chekhov, 1860-1904 Good Old Chekhov’s Gun Theory. It mostly works on the principle that everything within a story should be necessary to the telling of it.  Gun on stage?—someone gets shot for sure.Read More →