Bad play, rich awards

A dull play just keeps on winning awards.

Here is a review of Do Not Go Gentle which explains why a play that has won five awards has only been staged once:

Election dramas

by Michael Connor

About 7.30 p.m. it begins and I realise with horror that I’ve seen it before. It’s the Australian play that’s been on our stages, under a multitude of different titles, since the 1960s—turning generations of innocent audiences into rabid theatrephobes who relent from the distaste they feel for theatre only for popular musicals.

Read on: Election Dramas

Here is the latest award. The "independent production" was funded by taxpayers:

Playwright Cornelius takes gong at Sydney theatre awards

by Jason Steger and Gina McColl

MELBOURNE playwright Patricia Cornelius and Sydney literary critic James Bradley have taken out two major writing awards.

Cornelius is the winner of the Patrick White Playwrights’ Fellowship, announced at an event at the Sydney Theatre Company last night. The judges were playwrights Joanna Murray-Smith, Jane Bodie, writer and performer Jonathan Biggins and STC associate director Tom Wright.

The $25,000 prize acknowledges Cornelius’ substantial and diverse body of work that includes The Call, Love and Do Not Go Gentle, which has picked up a swag of awards for best script including the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award last year.

It is the fifth major award Cornelius has won since writing the script, bringing its tally to $100,000 over a number of years.

Despite its critical success, only a small audience has seen the work. Its one staging was an independent production at fortyfivedownstairs in 2010, directed by Julian Meyrick, and it has not been picked up since by the country’s main stages.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald