Cirrus@Austlit

'Melbourne, 1980s. A group of misfit teenagers break into forbidden fortresses.

'The Pentagon. Stanford. NASA. There is no theft. No profits. No harm. They just want to look around.

'But when you’re storming castles, not everyone gets out unscathed. Australia’s most awarded playwright, Patricia Cornelius (Who’s Afraid of the Working Class?, Do Not Go Gentle), returns with a zeitgeist-defining investigation into the price the powerful will pay to control the truth and why the children once forced to live with lies become their greatest adversaries. The ones who wanted to change the world.

'This is the story of Julian Assange. Edward Snowden. Chelsea Manning. It is a story about the costs of not staying silent.

'Come experience a master playwright’s undertaking of a complicated truth.'

Source: Malthouse Theatre.

'An uncompromising cinematic slap to the face from co-directors Trudy Hellier and Susie Dee, and writer, celebrated playwright Patricia Cornelius, the shattering new Australian conversation-starter SHIT is a psychological drama which unfolds over one long night of incarceration in a bleak holding cell.

'Caged for hours on end, tough-nuts Billy (Nicci Wilks), Bobby (Sarah Ward) and Sam (Peta Brady) slowly, uncertainly reveal their stories to each other. Theirs are stories of a lifetime of violence, of abuse, and of institutionalisation, and they’re all told with unsentimental, sometimes comical, and often gut-wrenching insight.'

Source: Inner West Film Festival.

'Two women, two plays, two powerful voices.
'This double volume pairs powerhouse playwright Patricia Cornelius, in collaboration with Susie Dee and Nicci Wilks, with rising star Benjamin Nichol in two searing monodramas about women who are dispossessed and dismissed.

'In RUNT, Cornelius, Dee and Wilks have created an expansive work about the runts of this world—the lesser, the weak, the insignificant, the 'unders'. Runt, a small woman who has endured nothing but misery, toughens up to face her oppressors and fight for equality and decency. But just as she starts to sense greatness rising in her, something shifts and she feels the dirt sucking her back in.
'[Cornelius's] art has a conscious rhythm, poetry and structure that make other writers seethe with envy. Her language doesn't sound naturalistic but when it's spoken by an actor, it sounds like it could never be anything but their voice.' —Time Out

'In kerosene, Nichol's unlikely protagonist Millie yearns for love and acceptance, finding instead rejection and humiliation at every turn … except from her sad, soft old grandfather, and her best friend Annie. Millie shapes her loyalty to Annie into a bond that burns hotter than any romantic furnace. Life sends them on different paths, but when Annie turns up bruised and bloodied on the doorstep, Millie sets out to honour her childhood friend in the only way she knows how: revenge.' (Publication summary)

'Against the backdrop of 1950s and 60s suburban Melbourne and in the wake of the Second World War, multi-award-winning writer Patricia Cornelius delivers a poetic, heart-rending tale that unpacks the shadow of war, and the trauma it leaves behind.

'The youngest of Jack and Martha’s five children, Christine idolises her father, especially his stories of wartime heroics. She cannot understand why her siblings – Jill, Johnnie and twins Door and Mouse – don’t share her love for their dad. Jill, meanwhile doesn’t understand why their mum puts up with him. As Christine watches on, one by one her siblings start to rebel against the tumultuous environment they are growing up in. Once fascinated by her father’s war stories, they slowly start to lose their shine as the conflict in Vietnam intensifies and war once again becomes front of mind for the family.'

Source: Production blurb.

'One small woman takes on the world.

'Following their incredibly successful and multi award-winning collaboration on SHIT, Susie Dee, Patricia Cornelius and Nicci Wilks have re-teamed to create RUNT, a play about the runts of the world: the lesser, the unwanted, the weak, those without clout, the insignificant; all the unders.

'Runt, a small undernourished woman has endured enough of the misery of being the runt of the litter. She toughens up and attempts to take power, to lead the oppressed, to rise up and fight, for equality, for decency and what’s right. She liberates sack after sack after sack of miserable runts. And she grows. She feels herself reaching eight foot or more. She gets a taste for what it means to be great. Trouble is, ‘greatness forgets runtness‘.' (Production summary)

'The Audition is a new multi-authored work that interrogates the protocols and power relationships of the audition process to uncover what it means to seek asylum. 

'The asylum seeker shares something in common with the actor in Australia.  They are both outsiders of uncertain status.  The asylum seeker just like the actor can become expert at being patient with a force that keeps them waiting without having their hopes dashed.  This is the liminal space that we will explore in The Audition. The stage is a country in itself. With its own rules and regulations. Or lack of them.'

Source: La Mama Theatre.

'Twenty-one years ago playwrights Andrew Bovell, Christos Tsiolkas, Melissa Reeves, Patricia Cornelius and Irine Vela came together to create Who’s Afraid of the Working Class?, a series of powerful interwoven vignettes that captured the zeitgeist of Melbourne and Australia in the 1990s. Now the same team reunite to take the pulse of our nation today, with director Susie Dee and an extraordinary ensemble of performers.

'What emerges is a funny and ferocious portrait of a country unable to reconcile its past, uncertain of its future and political vision. The colliding voices that make up this anthem might not always be in harmony, but they cannot be silenced.

'Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? was an ode to tiny struggles writ large; Anthem turns up the volume on the everyday injustices we choose not to hear.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'In Lovely Lovely Sometimes Ugly, a collection of four plays by one of Australia’s most fearless playwrights, Patricia Cornelius displays all her skill, wit, beauty and anger, and serves them up like a still beating heart on a chipped plate.

'Cornelius’s signature grungy poetic style is at its finest in the early play Love, a brutally beautiful journey into the emotional core of three broken souls in a broken world. In SLUT, a short, sharp stab into the heart of internalised misogyny, Cornelius explores the life and perceived crimes of Lolita, a schoolgirl whose sexual confidence both frightens and fascinates her peers. In The Club takes us into the adrenalin-fuelled, macho-pumped world of professional footballers and its intersection with slut-shaming and issues of consent. And in the sweeping, Lorca-inspired The House of Bernadette, the family of women left behind after the death of a patriarch is a goldmine of female desire, sexual repression, and individual compromise.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Stolen is a mystery that unravels in reverse chronological order, solving the interpersonal battle between two characters that resonates with a whole nation.'

Source: Screen Australia funding approvals.

'With their mining-mogul father dead, the Alba household is in mourning. All four daughters have been called home to pay their respects by their mother, Bernarda, who is truly a force of nature.

'The future seems wildly uncertain for all but the eldest sister, who has inherited a fortune and is engaged to the local heartthrob. But as tensions rise and tempers flare, will any of them have the power to alter their own destinies?' (Production summary)

'Annie, Ruby and Olivia are going out. They want to get laid, get loose, get love — but they are women in a world of men. Not just any men, gods among men, their beloved boys, the boys of the AFL. And the rules of the game out there in the world of the night club and the dance floor are merciless, and the lines of division are clear.

'Patricia Cornelius is one of Australia’s most awarded, brilliant and uncompromising playwrights. In this brand new work she weaves fiction together with verbatim material to shine her fierce light on women’s accounts of sexual violence in the dark world of the club behind the club.' (Production summary)

The dilapidated old caravan might be full of musty carpet and faded dreams, but for years a mother and daughter have called it home.

With nowhere else to go, Judy and daughter Donna live on top of each other, knowing the other won’t leave: they’re stuck, and will be till the end.

Judy holds court from the caravan’s double bed, surrounded by pills, a breathing machine and a flat-screen TV. Donna is just desperate not to die there. Donna’s looking to be whisked away by a Tinder date, but as the phone pings and Judy sucks oxygen from a mask in the tiny, cluttered space, they bicker and make up, scream and threaten violence and dream of better things.

Bitter and hilarious, tender and toxic, Caravan is a darkly comic look at life on the margins and the universal need for love.' (Production Summary)

'Three confronting and provocative plays about women. Muff by Van Badham – Winner of the 2014 NSW Premiers Award, the Nick Enright Award for Playwriting, Muff explores women, sex and relationships; a horrific, random rape of a young woman and the threads from this event that continue to wrap and bind their way into lives years after the physical injuries have healed. MinusOneSister by Anna Barnes – Sophocles & Electra is furiously wrenched into the present and told from the point of view of the teenagers. Eternal obsessions mingle with the obsessions of our times, bloodshed goes hand in hand with Bacardi Breezers and Facebook, and a chilling portrait emerges of a family irreversibly shattered by grief and guilt. SHIT by Patricia Cornelius – SHIT takes us into the world of three women – Billy, Bobby and Sam – three women from a violent, impoverished underclass who have landed in prison together after a vicious incident. These are the underbelly of womenhood we as a society so rarely want to admit exist.

'A group of young students taking radical action: rescuing a young asylum seeker, then hiding her from the authorities.' (Source: Monash University website)

'What of the women and girls who defy gender demarcations, who transgress the boundaries and restraints of social order and expectation?

'When a girl spits, or swears, or screams, or shouts, or pulls down her pants to moon someone from a car, or she laughs too loudly, or she’s too shrill, or she pulls up her t-shirt and flashes her tits, or she fights, really fights, head butts and with her fists, or she fucks too much or cuts her hair too short, and wears too much lipstick or none at all, or tells everyone she’s got a dick and she’s not a girl at all, all we want to do with this girl is lock her up and throw away the key. Out of control girls – angry, nasty girls – are a sight to behold. They’re terrifying, electrifying, they’re everything girls shouldn’t be, and we hate them.

'This is a work about these girls.

'Their names are Billy, Bobby and Sam.

'There’s not a single moment when the three young women transcend their ugliness. There’s no indication of a better, or in fact any, inner life. They don’t believe in anything. They’re mean, foul-mouthed, downtrodden, hard-bitten, utterly damaged women. They’re neither salt of the earth nor sexy. They love no one and no one loves them. They believe the world is shit, that their lives are shit, that they are shit.' (Production summary)

Three plays by female Australian playwrights, all centring on the 'gap year': the year after the end of high school.