Photo credit: Nicole Cleary
On Monday 1 April, playwright Patricia Cornelius received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the annual Green Room Awards ceremony at Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre. Here is her acceptance speech in full.
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There are many people I’d like to thank.
These are just a few.
Thank you Susie Dee, who is one of the finest directors in the country, who I’ve worked with a lot. She makes my plays soar.
Thank you Mary Lou Jelbart and fortyfivedownstairs for backing me and my work with such astounding certainty when no one else would. And for doing the same for many theatre practitioners.
Thank you, the many outstanding actors and creatives who have brought their extraordinary skills to also make my work soar.
Thank you, Green Room Awards Association, for choosing me for this award. It means a great deal to me to be part of this industry and to be recognized by my peers.
Thanks to Melbourne Workers Theatre, a company I co-founded in 1986, which lasted for 25 years, which offered me and many other playwrights, an apprenticeship of sorts, confronting us with the most wonderful and demanding and often impolite audiences you could imagine. A company that received funding.
Without a healthy independent theatre sector, we’re fucked.
La Mama is precious and is the heart and soul of independent theatre in Melbourne. It is partly funded.
Fortyfivedownstairs, Theatre Works and Red Stitch too are vital – fortyfive has never received core funding, Theatre Works is only partly funded, as is Red Stitch.
Ilbijerri is funded. Thank fuck for that.
Fringe is electric and nurtures hundreds and hundreds of theatre makers. The artists are not funded.
The independent sector had its guts kicked when Brandis stole the Oz Council funds and gave it to the mainstream. The money has only partly been returned to us. In the scheme of things, it wasn’t much in the first place. We are still reeling from its absence.
Melbourne was once considered the centre for combative, political, experimental works – for its radical telling of our own stories, daring to confront, to offend, to rattle an audience’s bones.
Victoria has no fully funded small or middle range theatres devoted to new Australian works. Where’s our Griffin Theatre Company? Where’s our Darlinghurst? Two fully funded companies in Sydney.
We struggle for funding, for support to get our work on. And we have to get our work on, so it can be seen, can be critiqued, can be up for awards, for publication, for further productions, so we learn from it for the next one.
More money for artists, so we don’t lose them from this trade, so they don’t have to constantly scrimp and save. More money for Australian stories that have breadth and power and say something about us and the world.
Here’s to a vibrant independent theatre.
