Vanessa Bates – September 2015

Vanessa is an award-winning writer of theatre, television, radio drama and film. Her plays have been produced by theatre companies around Australia and include Every Second, Match, Petunia Takes Tea and Darling Oscar. Vanessa has had several monologues/solo performance plays produced, including Hunger, First Light, The World’s Tiniest Monkey, The Magic Hour, The Night We Lost Jenny, and Homemade. A graduate of NIDA Playwrights’ Studio, Vanessa has taught playwriting and/or mentored playwriting students at NIDA and ATYP as well as Writers’ Centres in Sydney and Newcastle. She was PWA playwright-in-residence at Griffin Theatre and is the recipient of a residency at Cite Internationale des Arts-Paris and at Varuna in Katoomba. She is a member of 7-ON and contributed to their recently published book of monologues for HSC drama students, No Nudity, Weapons or Naked Flames. Her plays for students include Here Is the Beehive, Up The Creek (co-written with Brian Birkefield) and Wishful Thinking. Vanessa has written a narrative non-fiction book, Legs Up & Laughing, and has written for the acclaimed SBS drama East West 101 and Rush.

Checklist for an Armed Robber
Currency Press, 2009; ISBN 9780868198637
Full length play; 2 female, 2 male
In 2002, a young man rehearses for his first armed robbery on a bookstore in Newcastle. On the other side of the world, Chechen rebels hold siege of the Moscow Theatre, demanding liberation. One is a local, small time theft and the other an international political crisis, but both are born of a similar futility and powerlessness to be heard. Moving back and forth between Moscow and Newcastle, these real events are the basis for this exploration of what drives such acts of terror and the impact they have on the victims – the perspective from both ends of the gun.

PORN.CAKE
Australian Script Centre, 2011; ISBN 9780987392947
1.5 hours; 2 female, 2 male
Ant and Annie are a couple. So are Bill & Bella. Both are frighteningly close to middle age. As each couple sits down to some cake, nothing is said but everything is meant. For this is love done the contemporary way: conversations punctuated with text messaging, pleasures punctuated by food intolerances and happiness punctuated with rage. Cake’s not the only thing you could slice a knife through . . . a deliciously funny exploration of love and sex in the modern world.