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George Fairfax Memorial Award
Subcategory of Awards Australian Awards
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History

'The George Fairfax Memorial Award provides recipients with the opportunity to enhance their professional careers in the theatre industry at a critical time in their careers.' (http://vca.unimelb.edu.au/study/scholarships/george-fairfax-memorial-award

Notes

  • Biannual award open to Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) Theatre graduates within ten years of graduating to '...assist and encourage a young artist in the development of their professional career in the theatre industry'.

    Source: Melbourne University, Faculty of the VCA and Music website,www.vcam.unimelb.edu.au (Sighted: 22/9/10)

Latest Winners / Recipients

Year: 2010

Year: 2009

winner Precipice Catherine Ryan , 2011 single work drama

'"Precipice" is a play about two characters balanced right on the edge, hovering, held in the moment before inevitable change. It's about recent times — the tensions between anxiety, threat and compassion. About a society where some desperately want to raise the barricades, while others weep as they feel humanity slipping away.

It's about the bridges between us. About how powerful and how fragile they are. The Tasman, the Westgate, the one over your favourite creek bed in a childhood memory. How deeply these engineering marvels, these sites of suspension, imagination and tension are stamped in the Australian psyche. And it's about how potent, but often how seemingly insignificant and mundane, the chasms that divide us can be. And the awakening of the discovery that we may not just be simply divided after all.

Mel is a 40-year-old single working mother, struggling but strong, trying to maintain family, job and herself in a harsh world. A potent childhood incident has left her suffering from chronic vertigo, which she is only able to relieve by running. Al is older, a compulsive reader of death notices, and an obsessive attendee of the funerals of strangers. Through interior monologues and far-reaching conversations they reveal their pasts, presents, inner worlds and differing levels of consciousness as their lives converge. Source: http://castlemainefestival.com.au/ (Sighted 19/04/2011).

Year: 2005

winner y separately published work icon Keeper Steven Snell , 2005 Hobart : Australian Script Centre , 2006 Z1422685 2005 single work drama young adult Kevin and his best friend Neil have just been involved in a brawl at a party. During the fight someone was killed and now Kevin fears they'll be up on murder charges. They go to his older brother Russel for help - but something is not quite right. Russel isn't buying Kevin's version of events, and his lounge room becomes an interrogation room. Eventually, Kevin is forced to question what he believes about another shocking event that happened a year ago. Has he been deluding himself? Has he been wrong to protect his best friend all this time?
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