National Play Festival
promoting the best new Australian writing
Every year, the National Play Festival travels to a new location for a celebration of playwriting to inspire theatre producers, playwrights and audiences.
The centrepiece of the National Play Festival is the Showcase season of polished readings of new Australian plays. We strongly encourage imaginative and inventive responses to the possibilities of theatre.
Showcase plays are selected by competitive entry by PlayWriting Australia. The selection process concentrates on finding finished works that demonstrate an ambitious and vigorous engagement with their subjects and a sound understanding of the medium (click here for more info on our selection processes). Selected playwrights are provided with travel and accommodation and a collaborative team of actors, directors and dramaturgs to rehearse, develop and perform the Showcase plays.
The Showcase season is attended by key producers and presenters from across Australia to preview the selected works and join in the debate about where theatre writing is going. Works showcased at the Festival in previous years have gone on to be selected for production, and the Festival has also been a springboard for playwrights to access residencies, commissions and development opportunities both here and abroad.
PlayWriting Australia will hold the 2012 National Play Festival in Melbourne from 22 to 25 February.
We are thrilled to be taking the National Play Festival to Melbourne for the first time in the event's history.
Five fantastic new plays will be presented in 2012 by playwrights Gary Abrahams, Vanessa Bates, Nicki Bloom, Victoria Haralabidou and Tom Holloway. Read up on the playwrights at the Festival Blog.
We'll have more program announcements and info on how to book tickets when the full program is launched on Tuesday 31 January.
Stay tuned to www.nationalplayfestival.org.au for more!
2012 Submission Changes
PlayWriting Australia is changing the way it processes manuscripts. As you may know, PlayWriting Australia is one of a very small number of organisations left in the world that reads entire manuscripts gratis. This will not change.
As with all our programmes we read submissions in a multi-tiered assessment process that allows for multiple considered discursive responses. This will not change either.
From 2012, however, we want all our programmes to feed into the selections for our annual National Play Festival. As a result, plays selected for presentation during the 2013 Festival will be drawn from submissions to our various programmes, most especially the National Script Workshop and PostScript. As such, there will be no additional closing date for submissions to the National Play Festival from this year.
This will increase demand for those programmes and as a result we have included three closing dates for the National Script Workshops to our 2012 calendar (see the website for dates). And of course you can submit a script to PostScript at any time throughout the year. This change will allow us to better track, nurture and develop new writing in Australia, ensuring that the National Play Festival showcases the finest new plays available.
Past recipients
Visit the Playography
Archive
NATIONAL PLAY FESTIVAL 2011
15 - 19 March 2011
Parramatta Riverside Theatres (NSW)
Visit www.nationalplayfestival.org.au/2011
