Verity Laughton – April 24 2016

Verity is a playwright, television and video writer, author and poet. She has been runner up for the Blake Poetry Prize and the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize. Her 30+ professionally produced works have been produced nationally and internationally and include main-stage adult dramas, plays for radio, a promenade community event, a musical, adaptations, plays for child and family audiences, and for dance, puppets and theatre of image. Her awards include an AWGIE Community Theatre award for The Lightkeeper; an AWGIE Radio Drama for Fox; a Griffin Prize for Burning; an Adelaide Critics’ Circle Best New Australian Play for Carrying Light and an Inscription Award for The Ice Season. Her other works include The Nargun and the Stars, What Has Been Taken and a semi-verbatim play, Long Tan, about the major Australian battle of the Vietnam War in 1966.

The Sweetest Thing
Australian Script Centre, 2012;
90 minutes; 4 female, 3 male
Cast age: 16 to 18, 18+; Audience age: young adult, adult
A classic love story seen through the lens of a fragmented, grieving family, tinged with childhood memories and thoughts of days gone by, set within a shifting time span and the frame of chaos theory. After the sudden death of her father, Sarah, struggling to escape the bonds of her mother and two sisters, flees to New Zealand leaving the grief-stricken remains of her family behind in Australia. Teetering out of balance and contrary by nature she finds herself falling in love and lust with charismatic drifter Jimmy, a relationship that changes everything, forever.

A Crate of Souls
Phoenix Education, 2010; ISBN 9781921586415
90 minutes; 5 female, 6 male
Cast age: 16 to 18; Audience age: young adult
This play follows the 1836 journey of three immigrant ships from England towards the currently uncolonised South Australia which was going to be a new sort of colony, founded according to Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s plan of ‘systematic colonisation’. They were to be a new sort of colonist – men and women of means, travelling for four to six months with their emigrant labourers whose passages they had funded – to make a deliberate investment in a land which they saw as virtually uninhabited. But really, as one of the characters says in the play, these could have been ‘any ships travelling any ocean in search of any number of Utopias’.