As the Literary Manager of australianplays.org (now Australian Plays Transform), I commissioned a series of essays we called State of Play from playwrights with the provocation: What’s getting you active and/or riled right now? It didn’t have to be about theatre, though most of them are. I just wanted to get a snapshot of who was caring about what at that time. Here are a few of them… (spoiler alert; there are a few at the end that don’t belong to this series, but seem to me to sit well with this ‘opinion collection.’)
Tom Holloway on trying to do it all at once
Mary Anne Butler on writing in the regions, specifically Darwin
Robert Reid on live gaming and theatre
Activism in twenty-first century theatre
Finding the Metaphor – the Art of Remembering
Face it, We’re Shit
The Critical Gap
All of Me: The Tale of a Brown Girl with Big Dreams
Iain Sinclair on the State of Dramaturgy
On Andrew Bovell’s After Dinner
I can take no credit for this at all, but it’s one of my favourite talks on Australian Theatre. Given as a Playwrighting Australia Keynote address
My reflection on the end of the all-Australian era at Playbox
Playwrights talk about whatever is getting them excited
The interviews that follow are with Australian playwrights discussing the work they create, the works they aspire to create, and their thoughts on the Australian industry as a whole. As a collection, I look at these as a snapshot of the Australian theatre landscape from around 2000 to 2020. Things have changed significantly in the last decade, and the seeds of these changes are evident in these conversations. Considered as a collection, they make for some interesting historical and cultural reflection. I commissioned this series and did the first twenty or so before I moved on, and my colleague, John Kachoyan, took them over