Cherry on the cake. Syrup on the pancake. Saturday was Short & Sweet’s final night, a triple-bunger of Wildcards, Top 20 and the Great Cheque Giveaway to all the winning artists. My own play, Mercy Kitchen, lapped up the limelight as part of the ten-strong matinee of Wildcard shows. After a rocky dress rehearsal – [...]
Name your genre, and you’ll be got. The last week of Short & Sweet – Top 20 – is an orgasmic smorgasbord of styles and shades, from gooseflesh drama to chest-hurting humour. Not just the scripts, but the performances and productions are all stronger for the extra weeks, and the punter is the beneficiary. I [...]
Cirque du Soleil would struggle to match the mayhem in a single night. Where else but Short + Sweet could one ticket pitch you into radio drama, burlesque, mime, dance and ad-hoc claymation? Week Two of the festival sees the lunatics administer the asylum, a cause for celebration and disquiet in the same sharp intake. [...]
What say we have a moratorium on the afterlife? Two of the ten Short & Sweet Wildcards – Week One – entail some life beyond the grave, with a dead hippie and Jesus dropping by. Among the rest, we deal in dreams and two death wishes. Not a criticism, but a quiet plea for ‘other’ [...]
Snuck a preview at the first week of Short and Sweet plays last night, the dress rehearsal open to writers, actors and other festival satellites – and the news is upbeat. Of course, teething pains are part of the fun, like a wayward spot, a duffed word or a set-up taking almost as long as [...]
Who says crime doesn’t pay? Two of my short plays – both with a strong crime theme – are due to be lovingly pummeled in the coming months. The first, The Mercy Kitchen, is slated to be staged later this year as part of the Short & Sweet Fest in Melbourne. Winning a Wildcard berth, [...]
Agamemnon is a warrior out of luck. The poor sap goes 15 rounds with the Trojans, only to return to his native Greece to learn his wife Clytaemnestra has been sleeping around. Mind you, the warrior has returned with a tasty Trojan morsel by his side. A fair-skinned prophetess named Cassandra, whom nobody believes. Much [...]
You won’t expect any film rights to apply to the Commonwealth Sewerage Act of 1928. “No Harry Potter there,” jokes the Federal cop, played by Simon King. But anti-terrorism is a different septic tank altogether. As dry as the Senate paper may be, playwright Graham Pitts has applied his highlighter to the document, mixing its [...]
Picking up the baton from my last post…. The Wiredancer’s Waltz (Sven Swenson) pitches a pregnant Judi beside her laconic fella Frank, the two keeping vigil over a dead codger until help arrives. The set-up is delicious: death and birth at close quarters. And the finale has powerful life-affirming charm. Yet along the way the [...]
Two days, six plays – and no cooked breakfast after 11AM. That’s how the National Play Festival went down in Brisbane last week, a tumult of Australian theatre-in-progress, and the most compelling reason for deep-veined thrombosis known to any culture vulture. All up, eight scripts were on show – the winners among last year’s callout [...]