Wal Cherry Play of the Year Award for Best Unproduced Play
Subcategory of Awards — Australian Awards
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History

'Given annually for new Australian playwrighting this award honoured the achievements of Wal Cherry, an Australian theatre director and academic.' (https://australianplays.org/award/wal-cherry-award)

Notes

  • This award was introduced by the Victorian Arts Centre in 1989 to honour the achievements of Wal Cherry, a distinguished theatre director and teacher, who died in 1986.

Latest Winners / Recipients

Year: 2007

winner y separately published work icon Realism Paul Galloway , 2007 Strawberry Hills : Currency Press , 2009 Z1561082 2007 single work drama

'In the summer of 1939 in a small Moscow theatre a company of actors begins rehearsals of a new play to commemorate Stalin's sixtieth birthday. It's a tough gig, because for Soviet artists working towards the Radiant Future the old showbiz maxim "the show must go on" is an order you can't refuse.

'Another opening, another show trial! Realism is a comedy of nerves, a backstage farce set in a pressure cooker. It's about the spirit that makes art live and the forces that want to crush it.' (Publisher's blurb)

Year: 2006

winner The Glory Ross Mueller , 2006 single work drama young adult As Australia awakes to discover the tragic death of a high ranking soldier in a foreign war zone, his military family in the suburbs of Sydney is not only coming to terms with the death of a brother and an uncle but with public and government expectations of how to bury a nation's 'best mate'. But what actually happened to Brigadier Martin Connors at the end of a long and distinguished career? His nephew Tom, also a soldier, returns home with news that will shake this family to its core and leave its matriarch Elizabeth to pick up the pieces. Against a backdrop of the War on Terror and heightened homeland security, playwright Ross Mueller (The Ghost Writer) has fashioned both a heartbreaking family drama and an urgent moral examination from events as contemporary as last night's news bulletin. Source:http://www.hothousetheatre.com.au/season/theglory.htm (Sighted 31/03/2009)

Year: 2005

winner y separately published work icon Asylum Catherine Lazaroo , 2005 Strawberry Hills : Currency Press , 2008 Z1347712 2005 single work drama 'Lally Black is a psychiatrist who struggles to keep the lid on her doubts about her own funds of compassion. Yu Siying is a Chinese woman who has caught HIV in Australia. Afraid of China's judgement, Siying has one last chance to claim asylum, and believes Lally is the key to her appeal. Lally finds herself enticed into an imagined China, unfolding in the gulf between herself and Siying, causing her to acknowledge the threads that run between complacency and brutality'. (Publisher's blurb)

Year: 2004

winner y separately published work icon Love Patricia Cornelius , 2003 Hobart : Australian Script Centre , 2004 Z1226600 2003 single work drama (taught in 1 units) 'Tanya, Annie and Lorenzo are on the bottom of the heap. They're young but already the youth has been wrung out of them. They've been abused, they're abusive, and they're difficult to like let alone to love. But it is love in all its distorted and mutated forms that holds them together. Annie and Tanya make a pact; their love will protect them from an unloving world and it will endure. Even the dreadful and charming Lorenzo will not threaten it. Only doubt in each other's love can put a wedge between them.' (Back cover, Currency Press, 2006)
winner y separately published work icon A View of Concrete Gareth Ellis , 2004 Hobart : Australian Script Centre , 2006 Z1258401 2004 single work drama In a sprawling metropolis, where all the trees have been replaced by telephone boxes, the parks have become multiplexes, the clouds have turned a toxic orange and the animals are committing suicide, Billy is becoming a fairy. Jacquie wonders what the corrupt CEOs of the major corporations have in store for her. And James suspects his neighbour is planning to commit an atrocity. - Libraries Australia

Year: 2003

winner y separately published work icon The Frail Man Anthony Crowley , 2003 Strawberry Hills : Currency Press Playbox Theatre , 2004 Z1050146 2003 single work drama
VIEW ALL LISTED RECIPIENTS (18)

Works About this Award

Play of the Year for Davey 1998 single work column
— Appears in: The Age , 24 December 1998; (p. 15)
VIEW ALL WORKS ABOUT (1)
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