Bridgette Burton – March 14 2021

Bridgette has been writing for theatre since the early 1990s. She has written two one act plays, four full length plays and over 30 short plays which have been performed all over Australia and internationally. Bridgette won the R E Ross Trust Playwrights Script Development Award in 2005 for Killing Jeremy and in 2009 for Rhonda is in Therapy. Killing Jeremy was also shortlisted for the Griffin prize in 2006. In 2012 Bridgette developed Fury with the support of the Malcolm Robertson Foundation. Fury has now been developed into eight short webisodes. Bridgette’s latest full length work is Anno Zombie, a comedy about the end of the world, in Melbourne.

Image: Hoy Polloy and Baggage Productions

Rhonda is in Therapy
Australian Script Centre, 2016
75 minutes, 2 female, 2 male
Charlie Rhonda is a Professor teaching Chemical Engineering at The University of Melbourne. She has a lovely German husband, a delightful daughter and an excellent career. Rhonda’s life is perfect. Except that she can’t stop sleeping with one of her students, it has become an obsession. And she has an unspeakable tragedy in her past. That’s why Rhonda is in therapy. Rhonda is in Therapy is a drama about psychosis and depression. The play explores themes of grief and loss in a heightened naturalistic style.

Killing Jeremy
Australian Script Centre, 2007
77 minutes; 1 female, 1 male
Madeleine and Jeremy are a couple, mostly happy in the way ordinary people are. On they way, one night, to Jeremy’s parents’ holiday place, they have a terrible car accident and Jeremy is seriously hurt. Madeleine was driving and emerges unscathed. Jeremy is in a coma, and so badly damaged that he will never wake up. Madeleine resists pressure from the family and the hospital to let Jeremy die, and sits vigil by his side, warding off his parents and family, waiting for him to wake up or die. As she waits, she talks to Jeremy and begins to hallucinate that he talks back. Aided by vivid imaginations, a sense of humour and the inevitable truth, they examine their life as a couple, their agendas and betrayals, while parents and friends call by and are incorporated into the world that Madeleine and Jeremy begin to create.