ABOUT THE RADIO PLAYS
It was in early 1996 that I was invited to something called `Listen Up' - a workshop on writing for the radio. I went on a whim, out of curiosity, and to gain a new skill. It sounded interesting, and I thought I may as well make a quick adaptation of AM I YOUR DREAM? and send it along with the sea of propositions (`Dear Publisher', `Dear Editor' and so on) I sent out regularly like a big driftnet, in the vague hope that a little minnow may come back in it some time.
Some time later, I had resolved to ring around the various places that had manuscripts of mine and remind them to give them back to me. The ABC was part of this routine list. I began to ask them if they could kindly give my poor little play back so I could maybe use it as phoneside scribble paper or something. What transpired instead ... `Actually, we just had a meeting yesterday, and we think we'd like to produce your play.' Whoa ! It was very much a case of being in the right place at the right time - just in time for a festival of youth plays, Sounds Like Teen Spirit. In a teacup (something slightly larger and sturdier than a nutshell), they liked AM I YOUR DREAM? the radio play so much that they requested a bunch of other material, which I hastily assembled, among it HEBEPHRENIA a short story I wrote in reaction to my first days at university. They requested that I adapt this into a play, which proved to be just as enjoyable as adapting DREAM? In radio, drama finds its perfect symbiosis with prose. Although you'd assume that writing for radio is not much different than writing for theatre or even film, I find it handier to think of it as `three dimensional prose'. The writer's task is to be evocative; to make the reader feel as if he or she is in the scene somewhere, smelling the smells and hearing the sounds. To put a pair of headphones on and listen to a radio play can be an extraordinarily immersive experience
After a great start with radio, the wheels began to fall off, through no fault of my own. Anyone associated with the ABC has found more than wheels falling off their projects; even when we recorded my two plays in 1997 the station was almost embarrassingly under-resourced. Soon after my plays were broadcast the Ian Reed Foundation (established to support promising young radio writers) pledged financial and dramaturgical assistance for another radio-play, which became many different things. It was a half-hour script; it was a series of three short radio plays, it was a completely different half-hour script, which I worked on very briefly with Noelle Janaczewska as dramaturg. Finally, it was nothing at all.
Today, the ABC is a battleground and a shadow of its former self. The ABC were the first large corporation to take a punt on me, and it was heartening to find a place which still valued the idea of nurturing a young talent to eventual fruition. It was a very sad end for the moment to my work in a genre I enjoy immensely. Perhaps I will write for radio again one day, but in the meantime the ABC can barely afford to pay its leading lights, let alone me.1. Am I Your Dream ? : The Radio Play (1996)
Summertime. Two teenagers spot the partner of their dreams - each other. But what do you do? How can you tell if they feel the same way, how will you ever know unless you break the ice - or they break the ice ....? Nobody teaches you the answer to the question everybody asks themselves one time or another - AM I YOUR DREAM? See how far and yet how close we can come to the answer without even realising it. This award-winning play finds an appropriate and exciting new format in radio.
Hebephrenia : Dementia Praecox incident to the age of puberty.
If you ever thought life was tough, think back. Remember the awkwardness of asking a girl out, remember when she said yes, remember your first date, your first kiss ... your first rejection. It can be enough to send you crazy. But that's not the PC term. That's - `boys who fell to the ground gibbering idiots'. But who is crazy and who isn't?