Angela Betzien – September 2 2018

National Child Protection Week – September 2-8 2018

Angela is an award-winning playwright and founding member of the independent theatre company RealTV. Her other plays include the thriller, The Dark Room; Hoods, a contemporary tale of Hansel and Gretel; Mortido; and The Orphanage Project, which tells a history of institutionalisation from the perspectives of six women living between 1820 and 2007. Angela’s 30 minute play, The Teenage Alchemist, explores the challenges and friendship of two young people with cancer who meet online. In 2010 Angela received an Australia Council grant to develop her then new play for children, The Very True and Unusual Life of Chook, at the New Visions/New Voices Festival in Washington, USA. Other works include Dog Wins Lotto, Princess of Suburbia, Helicopter, Wickfield Wonderland and Tall Man.

Children of the Black Skirt
Currency Press, 2003; ISBN 9780868197609
12 female 14 male (cast of 3 possible with doubling) Audience Age: Teen
Three lost children stumble across an abandoned orphanage in the bush. They become trapped in a timeless world, haunted by spirits from the past. They are tormented, too, by the Black Skirt, a cruel governess who floats up and down the orphanage corridors wielding enormous scissors. But as the stories of these forgotten children are told – from pick-pocketing incidents in the eighteenth century to the tragedies of the Stolen Generations in the twentieth – their spirits are released, one by one. – RealTV DVD synopsis

War Crimes
Currency Press, 2011; ISBN 9780868199184
9 female, 1 male; chorus of boys, men & Iraqi women;
Set in a forgotten coastal town, this is the gripping story of five disenfranchised young women who are fighting for respect, railing against authority and struggling to form an identity in a small town with limited opportunities. The relocation of an Iraqi refugee family to the town provokes a climate of hostility and tension that threatens to violently explode. War Crimes continues the trademark technique of using real events as pretexts for the creation of relevant and provocative contemporary Australian drama.