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Kia ora <<First Name>>
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How did the year go so fast? We must have been too busy to notice. The year is not quite over yet but Playmarket has issued 450 performance licences and met the royalty collection targets we set. We celebrate by raising a satisfied toast to the growth of the New Zealand play.
Elsewhere in the bulletin you’ll find a report of the Playmarket awards night where we launched two fine new publications; awarded certificates to the Plays for the Young competition winners; as well as awarding the big prize – the Bruce Mason Award. But wait there’s more! There’s a new prize on the block. At the awards night I announced the Playmarket Award that will be offered from next year and come with a prize of $20,000. Since my appointment I have been lobbying for the resource to offer an award for senior or established playwrights. The number of opportunities to recognise and celebrate our playwrights is a deficit in the arts scene and CNZ, after conducting its own research, agreed. The process for deciding the winner will be confirmed next year for this, no doubt, hotly contested prize.
Jean Betts, Stuart Hoar, our guest judges (James Griffin and Brett Adam), and myself will certainly have our work cut out selecting the winners in the Adam NZ Play Award this year. We have received 120 entries – a record!!!
We are keen to keep improving the way you can access information and use our website. We have identified some improvements we can make, particularly in the bookshop section, and these will be in place soon. If you have thoughts on how we can improve the functionality of the site please drop me a line. There will be a prize package of books to the most useful response. Get those thoughts to me before 16 January.
Next year’s programmes have been released by most of the professional theatres and the number of NZ works scheduled is higher than ever. Doesn’t it make you feel good to be a New Zealander? See the article below.
I’d like to thank the Playmarket staff for helping make mine an easy job. It has been a pleasure working with you to support our clients (both writers and consumers) with dedication and friendly support.
Happy festive season everyone. In the holiday season don’t slack up - pick up a pen, tap on your desktop or laptop, and complete the next big play…oh wait, have a deserved rest - we’ve got 120 to get through over summer!
Nga mihi
Murray Lynch
Director of Playmarket
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ARTHUR MEEK
BRUCE MASON PLAYWRITING AWARD WINNER 2011
The Bruce Mason Playwriting Award was presented by PLAYMARKET to Arthur Meek at Downstage Theatre in Wellington on 23 November 2011.
The award exists to recognise early success in the career of the winning playwright; to encourage their continued exploration of the theatre medium and grants a $10,000 cash prize.
This award recognises Meek’s dedication as a playwright and the quality of his work.
The award winning actor and playwright launched his playwriting career in 2006 with The Cottage set in the toilet stalls of a scandalous local gay club.
On the Conditions and Possibilities of Helen Clark Taking me as her Young Lover took the country by stormlast election year (2008) and was affectionatelydescribed as "slightly disturbing, but highly entertaining...sharp political satire”. He performed the piece to packed houses, garnering best production of the year nominations and picking up awards throughout the country.
That same year his Young & Hungry commissioned work Yolk premiered at BATS Theatre and he was commissioned by the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution to write Charles Darwin: Collapsing Creation as part of worldwide celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of Darwin's masterpiece: On the Origin of Species.
After some time away from playwriting, working as an actor in shows such as The Almighty Johnsons; Nothing Trivial and Underbelly, he this year burst back onto the theatre scene with Sheep, written for Long Cloud Youth Theatre’s summer season and the critically acclaimed On The Upside-Down of the World commissioned, produced and toured by Auckland Theatre Company and based on the 1884 memoirs of Lady Anne Martin - Our Maoris.
The Bruce Mason Playwriting Award has, since 1983, recognised the work of an outstanding emerging New Zealand playwright. Previous winners include many of this country’s most celebrated writers including Toa Fraser, Hone Kouka, Briar Grace-Smith and Jo Randerson, and was last year awarded to Eli Kent.
The recipient is decided through voting by a panel of leading Artistic Directors and Script Advisors throughout New Zealand.
The Award is named after the man considered to be New Zealand’s first most significant playwright, Bruce Mason, who died in 1982. His plays are still produced widely today and many, such as The Pohutukawa Tree and The End of the Golden Weather (produced by Auckland Theatre Company this year), have come to be considered New Zealand classics.
The award is sponsored by the Bruce Mason Estate, Downstage Theatre Society and the FAME Trust.
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CONGRATULATIONS TO...
Whiti Hereaka - selected for the Summer Residency at the Michael King Writers' Centre.
BATS Theatre - whose premises have been bought and secured for the theatre by Sir Peter Jackson and Lady Fran Walsh.
Arthur Meek (On The Upside-Down Of The World), Fiona Samuel (Bliss) and Thomas Sainsbury (Supercity) - all winners in the 2011 NZ Writers Guild's SWANZ Awards.
Eli Kent - awarded an Arts Foundation New Zealand New Generation Award.
James Griffin (Outrageous Fortune) - awarded Best Script drama/comedy at the Aotearoa Film and Television Awards.
All the nominees and winners in the 2011 Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards.
PLAYMARKET wishes to especially congratulate:
Ralph McCubbin Howell - The Peter Harcourt Award for Outstanding New Playwright of the Year sponsored by BATS Theatre and Taki Rua Productions for The Engine Room.
Dean Parker - Outstanding New New Zealand Play of the Year sponsored by PLAYMARKET and Capital E National Theatre for Children for Slouching Toward Bethlehem.
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NZ THEATRE IN 2012
Homegrown writing is all the rage this coming season. All the kids are doing it. It’s ‘trending’. Keep up!
New Zealand’s major theatres and theatre companies are publishing their programmes for 2012 and there is plenty to get your wiri on about!
The year starts with a TIHEI MAURIORA! New Zealand and particularly Maori work features proudly and resolutely alongside some international big-guns during the New Zealand International Arts Festival. Hohepa, an opera in Maori and English by Jenny McLeod, Tu by Hone Kouka, Taki Rua’s revival ofJames Broughton’s 1991 play Michael James Manaia and The Maori Troilus and Cressida to name a few.
Auckland Theatre Company is producing eight main bill works in their 2012 season, entitled Encounter - four of which are by Kiwi writers.
The Motor Camp by Wellingtonian Dave Armstrong holds the fort until a mid-season burst of NZ works headed by Roger Hall’s A Shortcut To Happiness and followed by Black Confetti by 2010 Bruce Mason Playwriting Award winner Eli Kent and Awatea by the man himself – Bruce Mason.
Centrepoint Theatre in Palmerston North so very nearly offers exclusively New Zealand works (83.3333333% to be precise) in 2012. They premiere two new NZ plays - Roger Hall’s You Can Always Hand Them Back in April and Victor Rodger’s At The Wake in July as well as producing Well Hung by Robert Lord and The Motor Camp by Dave Armstrong and playing host to Taki Rua’s touring production of Michael James Manaia - direct to Centrepoint from the NZ International Arts Festival.
2012 is a great year for New Zealand plays at Wellington’s Circa Theatre with an impressive list of new works being hosted in Circa Two, among them Tawata Productions’ Sunset Road by Miria George and The Mourning After by Ahi Kahunarahan; The Tigers Of Wrath by Dean Parker and Manawa by Jamie McCaskill. The mainstage productions include Roger Hall’s A Shortcut To Happiness, the world premiere of West End Girls adapted for the stage by Ken Duncum; The Truth Game by Simon Cunliffe, Cinderella, the Roger Hall pantomime and Peninsula by Gary Henderson – Circa’s offering for the International Arts Festival.
BATS Theatre is…well, prolific in their support of NZ plays and practitioners. They will host scores of shows next year so keep an eye on their website.
Christchurch’s Court Theatre is picking themselves up after a hugely difficult year in a city shaken and grieving. They have programmed Roger Hall’s A Shortcut to Happiness to launch their new performance space and their full programme will be announced early in the year.
Many more productions will tour the country’s popular regional festivals and Capital E National Theatre for Children will again, to the delight of children up and down the country, tour two new commissioned works: Around the World and Buck Again,for 2-7 year-olds, by writer/composer team Jenny and Laughton Pattrick and Magnolia Street by Dave Armstrong for the 8-14s.
So… I hope you didn’t have anything else planned for 2012 because you are going to be pretty busy. Take some time over the summer break to leaf through the programmes and browse around the websites, and mark in your spotless new 2012 diary all the amazing New Zealand works you simply cannot bear to miss (or be seen to miss).
Nga mihi mahana and see you at the theatre.
Aneta Ruth
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CULTURAL STORYTELLERS - NZ ICONS
The Big Idea
In Rita and Douglas writer Dave Armstrong explores the tempestuous relationship between writer Rita Angus and composer Douglas Lilburn, using Rita’s own words and Douglas’ music. Portraying these two great NZ icons are two of our current stage icons, actress Jennifer Ward-Lealand and pianist Michael Houstoun.
Renee Liang talked to Dave and Jennifer.
Read the article here
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NEW PUBLICATION: LONDON CALLING
 Ken Duncum
The three plays in this book I think of as the music plays. If you¹d asked me ten years ago, I would have said they were about the intersection of popular overseas music culture with New Zealand society, each of them showing a slice of Kiwi kids seeking an identity and a relationship to the world through different ways of dressing, talking, posing and thinking delivered to them through music. British music. The paradox of us looking to another culture to tell us who we are.
And that is indeed one connecting element. But increasingly clear to me, as I walk away from them, is another - that their central characters are all struggling to make a present in the overwhelming shadow of their past; the blame, pain and recrimination that still attaches to them.
And in each case, in each relationship, out of struggle and exhaustion comes hope. And kindness. Which - in the end - are the clothes that love wears.
Don and Phil Everly find a moment for the magic to happen one more time, John Jamieson loses in love but triumphs in fantasy, Julie and Terry pass through the fire but will stay together.
Underneath the songs performed and referenced in them, I hear another music stitching these plays together - a harmony, sweet and stinging, of loss and redemption.
Blue Sky Boys
Wellington 1964 and The Everly Brothers, at a low point professionally and personally, are about to perform in the half empty Buffalo Hall. Across town The Beatles are also performing, but to rapturous crowds. Tensions mount between brothers Phil and Don as two Beatles fans, Fran and Jillian, are unwittingly caught in the crossfire.
John, I’m Only Dancing
Glam gatecrashes an early seventies boys' high as a subversive music teacher turns macho school culture on its head via a staging of David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust.
Waterloo Sunset
The Brits Club - a converted Wellington boathouse where ex-pat Poms and Kiwi punks collide on the night of the 1980 FA Cup Final. Childless couple Terry and Julie find themselves faced with the same burning question as Stormboy, Oik and Cat - if there's No Future, how do you grow up?
Available from the PLAYMARKET BOOKSHOP here
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THE WRITERS' CHARTER
The Writers’ Charter was adopted on June 4th, 1986 at the Annual Conference of the International Affiliation of Writers Guilds held in Toronto, Canada. On June 3rd, 1987 at the Annual Conference held in Los Angeles, USA, the Charter was adopted as the Preamble to the Affiliation Agreement.
The writer is a primary creator of works of imagination, entertainment and enlightenment; a significant initiator of cultural, social and economic processes. These are of basic importance in all societies. To fulfill effectively these social responsibilities, the writer must have the following rights:
1.The right to be acknowledged, legally, morally and contractually as the author of one’s work;
2.The right to complete freedom of expression and communication, and freedom from any form of censorship;
3.The right to maintain the integrity of a work and to protect it from any distortion or misuse;
4.The right to fair payment for all uses of a work;
5.The right to have the work published or produced solely on the basis of its merit, without regard to any form of invidious discrimination which shall include, but not be limited to, age, color, gender, marital status, national origin, physical or emotional instability, race, religion, sexual orientation, social or political affiliation or belief of the writer;
6.The right to form unions or guilds entitled to bargain and act collectively for their members.
See here to read more including the goals of the Affiliation.
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Playmarket is grateful for the support of
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