As a writer for performance Catherine has had scripts produced around Australia and internationally. Her accolades include the Griffin Playwriting Award, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, New Dramatists Exchange and AACTA Awards for Best Short Film and Best Screenplay. She studied screenwriting at the Australian, Film, Television and Radio School and was the recipient of the Qantas Travel Award graduate prize. Please see “Plays” and “Film Scripts” index icons for up to date list of works. She is a member of 7-ON PLAYWRIGHTS – in 2012 No Nudity, Weapons or Naked Flames, a book of monologues, was published by Federation Press, and included three monologues by each of the seven members.
Of late she has dovetailed her writing and art into the creation of a graphic novella, My Charitable Works.
Amateur Licence Form
Plays
- Cast: 3 male, 3 female
- Joss is 22 years old, she’s tried and failed to kill herself but is determined in her own chaotic way to try again. A Day Too Great charts the night of her suicide watch. In her flat, her boyfriend and best friend are with her – watching, waiting, increasingly terrified and exhausted. Through the night the pain yelps out of Joss – she has the impulse to cut and crush those dearest to her, to cast out every demon thought, to wrestle with her murderous god as she tests the limits of love, spinning those in her orbit on a darkening trajectory… A Day Too Great is a searing portrait of psychic pain. It examines the fragile bonds that hold us all in place, blowing away the comforting aphorisms and asks the question what part of the self needs to be killed in order to live?
- Cast: 1 main male character, 6-8 ensemble (mixed gender, some doubling)
- Clark In Sarajevo traces the journey of Clark Cant, a mild-mannered reporter, who in an effort to cast off his ordinariness reinvents himself as a war correspondent in Sarajevo. It is a play about the gaze of the West as it follows Clark’s fall from a flat disengaged spectator/voyeur of the siege, to a man who comes to embody the complex emotions of an uncomprehending witness to a catastrophe.
- Published by the Australian Script Centre.
- Cast: 8 males, 6 females
- It is 1946 and Peggy is an expressionist artist in a Sydney that doesn’t yet understand. But it matters not for on one fateful night she meets the young, rich and powerful art patrons, the Huxleys. She swoons, she falters, she falls in love but does love really look like this?
- Published by the Australian Script Centre
- Cast: 2 males, 2 females (plus ensemble)
- Family Running for Mr Whippy is a reverie into the outer suburbs in one woman’s inner world. It is a world which is haunting and hilarious, where imagination and memory intermingle ominously, where the narrator struggles to find her way through it, to go above it, to find a way, out, and to see… It is an experimental work, approximately 20 minutes long.
- Published by the Australian Script Centre.
- Cast: 1 male, 1 female (with doubling)
- Lydia is a sexy older woman, gifted with higher thought, a house in a loveless suburb and a water pistol ready to use on the lost men who follow her home. When two ‘Girls’, that she dubs ‘Lesbosses’, move in across the street, one pregnant, Lydia swings between the deranged and the profound as she tries to gift to them and their baby the love, life and reality she’s increasingly struggling to find. These gifts come in the form of tatty objects found in the street of which Lydia has imbued with power, magic and meaning. This transmutation of power to the objects gives her safety and power however in the course of her story Lydia is forced to face down the fact that her gifts are meaningless. Lydia is set free from the need and disappointment of others and she is given a clarifying moment of transcendence on which to act.
- Not available for amateur license; please contact RGM for a copy of the play.
- Cast: 2 male
- A man traumatized by his past is followed by his shadow self. In his attempts to transcend his difficulties, his shadow is always there. It transforms constantly between advocate, lover, tormentor and friend. (Short play – 20 minutes)
- Please contact RGM for a copy of the play.
- Cast: 2 female, 2 male
- A ripping yarn of smuggling, a search for treasure and a ghost. Told in promenade theatre style
- AWGIE Award nomination
- Please contact RGM for a copy of the play.
