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Hannie Rayson

HANNIE RAYSON

  (1957 - )
Nationality:    Australian
email:    n/a     Website:    n/a

Literary Agent:    HLA Management Pty Ltd  

Hannie Rayson has established a reputation for topical, complex Dramas written with wit and humour. A graduate of Melbourne University and the Victorian College of the Arts, she has an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from La Trobe University and is a Fellow of the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne. Her plays have been extensively performed around Australia and internationally. they include Please Return to Sender, Mary, Leave It Till Monday, Room to Move, Hotel Sorrento, Falling From Grace, Competitive Tenderness Life After George, Inheritance and Two Brothers. She has been awarded two Australian Writers' Guild Awards, four Helpmann Awards, two NSW Premier's Literary Awards and a Victorian Premier's Literary Award as well as the Age Performing Arts Award. She also wrote Scenes from a Separation with Andrew Bovell. For television she has written Sloth (ABC, Seven Deadly Sins) and co-written two episodes of SeaChange (ABC/Artists Services). A feature film of Hotel Sorrento, produced in 1995, was nominated for ten Australian Film Institute Awards. In 1999 she received the Magazine Publishers' Society of Australia's Columnist of the Year Award for her regular contributions to HQ magazine. Hannie made playwriting history when Life After George was the first play to be nominated for the Miles Franklin Award. In 2006 she was nominated for the Melbourne Prize for Literature, a prize for a Victoria-based writer whose body of published or produced work has made an outstanding contribution to Australian literature and to cultural and intellectual life.

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below is a list of Hannie Rayson's plays - click on a Play Title for more information

         Competitive Tenderness         Dear Nell         Extinction         Falling From Grace         Glass Soldier         Hotel Sorrento         Inheritance         Leave It Till Monday         Life After George         Mary         Meant To Be Spoken         Please Return To Sender         Room To Move         Scenes From A Separation         Swimming Club, The         Two Brothers         Wall Street Creche

Competitive Tenderness

Synopsis:
An hilarious contemporary farce. In the competetive, fast lane of Australian politics, the City of Greater Burke is in the frontline of local government reform. Striving to become a model of leaner and meaner bureaucracy, the city is rationalising at an irrational speed. Driving the push for competition is the fearless Dawn Snow, Chief Executive officer; an emissary from the world of private enterprise. A volatile office environment, a gunpowder of ethnic mix, dangerous dogs on the loose and a Traffic Department overtaken by neo nazis . . . this is a play which creates pure laughter from its inspired havoc. Hannie Rayson shows us the personal and the political for what they really are - dangerously funny bedfellows.

Notes:
-

1st Produced:
Merlyn Theatre, Cub Malthouse, Melbourne, Australia    1996

Organisations:
Playbox

1st Published:
Currency Press, Sydney,    -

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
Farce

Parts:
Male:  4            Female:  4            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Dear Nell

Synopsis:
-

Notes:
-

1st Produced:
The Madwoman Monologues    2011

Organisations:
Baggage Productions

1st Published:
-   -

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
Monologue play

Parts:
Male:  -            Female:  -            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Extinction

Synopsis:
Extinction is set on the windswept coast of southern Australia, where the dense temperate rainforest sweeps down to the blue wilderness of the Great Southern Ocean. One wild winter night, Harry Jewell is driving along the Great Ocean Road, when he hits an animal. He stops and discovers that the creature is still alive. He picks it up and drives through the storm to a wildlife shelter, where an American zoologist, Dr Piper Ross, is on duty as a volunteer. Harry Jewell recognizes that the animal is a tiger quoll, once common in these parts, but now on the verge of extinction. The quoll dies, but the two of them are bonded by their attempt to save its life. A week after the quoll incident, Harry Jewell shows up at the CAPE Institute, where he meets with the director, Heather Dixon-Brown. He slaps two million dollars on the table and says that he wants to fund a research project to save the tiger quoll. But there is a complication. Harry is the Managing Director of Powerhouse Mining. He has a license to explore the Otways for brown coal. Meanwhile Heather Dixon-Brown's brother, Andy is facing his own crisis of mortality. Getting into bed with Big Coal and letting Powerhouse mine the forest, will happen over his dead body. This is a play about passion, ethics and what it means to live with the shadow of death (our own and other species). Does it matter if the tiger quoll's days are numbered? Perhaps extinction is just part of the cycle of life or is human intervention necessary?No one in this play is wicked. No one is entirely virtuous. What unites them all is the one urgent question, in the age of global warming, how are we to live?

Notes:
-

1st Produced:
-    -

Organisations:
-

1st Published:
http://australianplays.org/script/ASC-1597   -

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
drama 100 min

Parts:
Male:  -            Female:  -            Other:  4

Further Reference:
-

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Falling From Grace

Synopsis:
A play with a bright comic surface and mysterious depths. It is about women in medicine, in the media and in the office - power and authority in female hands. It is also about public morality and a struggle between women to see who should be its guardian. these women are best friends in a professional world. they are witty and erudite, passionate in pursuit of success and relentless in their pursuit of passion. they juggle careers, children and lovers. they are forty and their friendship is about to be tested.

Notes:
-

1st Produced:
Playbox Theatre, Melbourne    1994

Organisations:
-

1st Published:
Currency Press, Sydney,    -

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
2 Acts Play/Drama

Parts:
Male:  2            Female:  5            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Glass Soldier

Synopsis:
the Glass Soldier is based on the true story of an Australian painter named Nelson Ferguson, who served in France as a field ambulance officer in WWI. This is an epic romance about a young Australian who falls in love with Maddie, an English girl, shortly before he is plunged into the horrors of the Somme. He returns to Australia with an injury that threatens to destroy his vision. But Maddie crosses the world to find him. Despite his blindness and his loyalty to a violent fellow soldier, Nelson and Maddie build a life together, filled with hope and light.

Notes:
-

1st Produced:
-    2008

Organisations:
-

1st Published:
http://australianplays.org/   -

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
Epic drama 120 min

Parts:
Male:  8            Female:  4            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Hotel Sorrento

Hotel Sorrento
Hilary lives in seaside Sorrento with her Father and sixteen year old son; Pippa is visiting from New York and Meg returns from England with her English husband. Three sisters, reunited after ten years in different worlds, again feel the constraints of family life. It is Meg's semi-autobiographical novel, recently short-listed for the Booker prize, which overshadows their homecoming. It is about expatriatism, our perception of home and the tensions that exist between those who've left and those who've stayed behind. It is about the responsibilities of family obligations and national ties, the rights to individuality within a clan and a country.

Notes:
-

1st Produced:
Playbox Theatre, Melbourne    1990

Organisations:
-

1st Published:
Currency Press, Sydney, 1990   978-0868196817

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
2 Acts 90 min Play/Drama

Parts:
Male:  4            Female:  4            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Inheritance

Inheritance
In the Mallee country in rural Victoria, the Hamilton and Delaney families gather to celebrate twin sisters Dibs and Girlie's eightieth birthday. But these have been heartbreak years in the bush and the cracks are beginning to show - between parents and their children and between siblings, between those who have been loyal to the land and those who have left it, between farmers and townies, between country folk and their city cousins. And in the background is always the question: Who gets the farm?

Notes:
-

1st Produced:
Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne    2003

Organisations:
Melbourne Theatre Company

1st Published:
Currency Press, Australia >>>, 2003   978-0868197203

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
2 Acts Play/Drama

Parts:
Male:  6            Female:  6            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Leave It Till Monday

Synopsis:
-

Notes:
-

1st Produced:
Geelong    1984

Organisations:
-

1st Published:
-   -

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
-

Parts:
Male:  -            Female:  -            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Life After George

Synopsis:
We are the people of the sixties. We are the players in a great revolution, forged not by men at war, but by men in love. Peter George. This is the story of three women, three marriages and one husband. After the charismatic radical, Professor Peter George, crashes a light plane on an island in Bass Strait, his death brings his three wives together. From Paris and Marxism in 1968, through feminism into cyberspace, George married the 'it' girl of the successive generations. In the three marriages we see the progress of Australia's intellectual and political life from the idealistic sixties to the pragmatic nineties. From the barricades to the world wide web. This is a play about the radical baby boomers who defected to the other side, and those who have tried to keep the faith. It is also about the revenge of the supposedly apathetic and cynical Generation Xers. Are we witnessing the death of idealism? Or is irony the only strategy for the new miilleniu?

Notes:
-

1st Produced:
-    -

Organisations:
-

1st Published:
Nick Hern Books, London, 2002   -

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
2 Acts Play/Drama

Parts:
Male:  2            Female:  4            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Mary

Synopsis:
Mary is a play about being Greek and growing up in Melbourne. It juxtaposes a Greek-Australian family with an Anglo-Australian one, focussing on the relationships between mothers and their teenage daughters. the play explores the conflicts and the comedy of cultural difference, both within families and between them. It is also about the quest for identity as women, daughters and mothers.

Notes:
-

1st Produced:
Melbourne    1981

Organisations:
-

1st Published:
Yackandandah, 1985   -

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
One Act

Parts:
Male:  -            Female:  5            Other:  can be played with 4F

Further Reference:
-

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Meant To Be Spoken

Synopsis:
-

Notes:
Some of Melbourne's most exciting playwrights present their own work in a Sunday afternoon celebration of new Australian playwriting. Featuring: Adam Cass, Patricia Cornelius, David Mence, Declan Green, Tee O'Neill, Hannie Rayson and Amelia Roper, hosted by Robert Reid.

1st Produced:
Fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne, Vic    21 Feb 2010

Organisations:
2010 Searchlight Festival

1st Published:
-   -

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
short Drama

Parts:
Male:  -            Female:  -            Other:  -

Further Reference:
http://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/event/90312

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Please Return To Sender

Synopsis:
-

Notes:
-

1st Produced:
Melbourne    1980

Organisations:
-

1st Published:
-   -

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
-

Parts:
Male:  -            Female:  -            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Room To Move

Synopsis:
A comedy about the impact of feminism at a time when it has become a permanent third partner in our relationships, particularly the repercussions for a family when a 30 year-old "new man" moves in with their 62 year old mother.

Notes:
Co-winner 1986 Awgie Award.

1st Produced:
Melbourne    1985

Organisations:
-

1st Published:
Yackandandah, Montmorency, Victoria, 1985   -

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
2 Acts Play/Drama

Parts:
Male:  3            Female:  3            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Scenes From A Separation

Synopsis:
there are two sides to every separation. Two truths. A fascination collaboration between two of Australia's most exciting writers. A story which will resonate with anyone who has ever loved and lost. Mathew and Nina have been married for twelve years. He is forty; a successful publisher. Always in control, his pace is enormous and his path is littered with the discarded souls of those who tried to keep up. Nina's thirty-eight; a journalist. she hasn't worked since the birth of the children. She's restless; looking for something. So when Mathew suggests she takes on the biography of Lawrence Clifford, tycoon, philanthropist and now Australian of the Year, she throws herself into the project with an all-consuming enthusiasm. A play about love and betrayal, about sex, sacrifice and survival, of break-up and break-down.

Notes:
written with Andrew Bovell

1st Produced:
Melbourne    1995

Organisations:
-

1st Published:
Currency Press, Sydney, 1996   -

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
Play/Drama

Parts:
Male:  3            Female:  4            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Swimming Club, The

Swimming Club, The
Six young people from around the world, including two UWA students, spend one glorious summer together on a Greek island in 1983. they are beautiful, adventurous, idealistic and believe that the world is theirs for the taking.Fast-forward to 2009:Each in their own way, they feel trapped by their life choices and are baffled by their children's youth culture in the new millennium. Will a reunion on their magical Greek island be able to rekindle their spiritual fire?

Notes:
-

1st Produced:
Summer Theatre, Melbourne    04 Feb 2010

Organisations:
Melbourne Theatre Company and Black Swan State Theatre Company

1st Published:
Currency Press, Australia (2010)>>>    978-0-86819-875-0

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
Play/Drama

Parts:
Male:  3            Female:  4            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Two Brothers

Two Brothers
the Benedict brothers are on opposite sides of the political divide. Eggs is the Minister for Home Security and prime minister-in-waiting. Tom is a refugee advocate and the head of a charitable foundation. the brothers have a relationship based on affection and respect. And in the jumble of family life they have managed to accommodate their ideological differences. But on Christmas Day an Indonesian fishing boat packed with refugees goes down in the Indian Ocean. Two hundred and fifty people drown, and one man survives. What happens when two powerful, passionate and socially-committed brothers encounter deadly conflict?

Notes:
-

1st Produced:
Melbourne Theatre Company, Australia    2005

Organisations:
-

1st Published:
Currency Press, Sydney,    978-0868197814

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
Play/Drama

Parts:
Male:  5            Female:  3            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Wall Street Creche

Synopsis:
-

Notes:
-

1st Produced:
-    -

Organisations:
-

1st Published:
-   -

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
Ten Min

Parts:
Male:  1            Female:  1            Other:  baby

Further Reference:
-

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