Frank Hatherley – July 7 2019

Dry July is an alcohol free month to raise funds for people affected by cancer.

Frank is a writer, director and critic whose first job was in advertising, followed by radio announcing, before moving to England and pursuing a successful career in BBC television drama, first as a script editor, then as a producer. He has also been a senior university lecturer in television production. Frank has written plays and musicals, and since his return to Australia after an absence of 34 years, he has continued to write Australian drama. His other musical plays include The Merry Widow from Bluegum Creek, (Franz Lehar’s music newly orchestrated by Stephen Gray), which follows the original plot but is set in Australia, and Rosie (music by Peter Stannard), inspired by the life of cockney Rosina Shaw who for 40 years sang opera and operetta in Martin Place while selling flowers from her stall. Frank is a member of the Film Critics’ Circle and writes reviews of new Australian movies for the London based Screen International. He is a prostate cancer survivor, and his diary of this experience can be read at www.frankhatherley.com/my-prostate-diary.

Bertha Lawson

My Henry Lawson
Australian Script Centre, 2015
100 minutes; 1 female, 2 male
Covering the years 1896-1902, this play examines the traumatic marriage of Henry and Bertha Lawson. Middle-aged Bertha delivers a lecture to the NSW Poetry Society in 1923. She calls her censored version of history ‘My Henry Lawson’. But, as she speaks, we see the reality of her life with the famously unreliable poet. In 1896 ‘Banjo’ Paterson is Lawson’s solicitor as well as his rival ‘bush poet’. Stunned to discover that the cash-strapped, heavy-drinking 30 year old Lawson has secretly married a 19 year old nurse, Paterson tries to advise his client. The action follows Henry and Bertha to the goldfields of Western Australia, and then to London. When Paterson comes to London he finds the Lawsons in a desperate condition. Bertha’s sanity is under attack. But when the Lawsons return to Sydney it is Henry who attempts suicide – from a Sydney Harbour cliff top. The play includes excerpts from 8 of Lawson’s more self-revealing poems.

Ned Kelly’s Sister’s Travelling Circus – Songs composed by Jeremy Barlow
Available from David Spicer Productions, 2001
2 female, 5 male, optional chorus (at least one performer needs to be able to play guitar, fiddle or squeezebox)
Set in 1898, Kate Kelly is touring round the backblocks with her tawdry show celebrating the life and death of her infamous brother Ned, hanged 18 years previously. In Gundagai one of her small cast does a runner and she has to employ a local actor at the last minute. This ring-in proves to be more trouble than he’s worth, possibly an Irish terrorist on the loose. The fiendishly clever plot simultaneously covers the afternoon rehearsing of the newcomer (who proves to be a terrible actor) at the same time as the disastrous evening performance.