Robert Reid – December 6 2020

Robert is a playwright, director and academic. He holds a PhD in Australian Theatre History from La Trobe University. Robert’s award-winning plays have been produced by the Melbourne Theatre Company and his own independent companies. He won the St Martin’s Playwright of the Year award in 2000 for his short play Pat Sabatine’s Eighth Birthday Party and was given the 2005 RE Ross Trust Playwright Development Award for A Mile in her Shadow, a play based on his own experience with Dissociation Disorder, an extreme expression of which was formerly known as multiple personality disorder. Sad Bird Boy and the Scalpel Fingered Girl won both the Best Independent Theatre Company Prize and the Best Overall Performance Prize at Short and Sweet Melbourne 2005. Robert has been Artistic Director of the independent theatre company Theatre in Decay, an Affiliate Writer at Melbourne Theatre Company and an Associate Artist at The Storeroom. He is currently artistic director of the games-based performance company Pop Up Playground and co-editor and co-founder of Witness.

Portraits of Modern Evil
Australian Script Centre, 2008; 90 minutes, 4 female, 3 male
Cast age: 16 to 18, 18+; Audience age: young adult, adult
In the winter of 1942, Melbourne’s shadowy streets were the scene of three brutal stranglings by the elusive Brown-Out Strangler. These killings took place as World War II wore on to its bloody climax and as Melbourne was invaded by its allies: an army of hard-drinking American soldiers living loudly and lewdly. Portraits of Modern Evil imagines what might have happened if two men on whom the war left an indelible mark had crossed paths: Albert Tucker, one of Australia’s greatest modern painters, and Eddie Leonski, better known as Australia’s first serial killer. Filled with haunting images, this is a surreal and frightening tale.

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Garbage
Australian Script Centre, 2010; 0 female, 2 male (older man and younger man, cross gender casting possible)
Cast age: 16 to 18, 18+; Audience age: teen, young adult, adult
A grungy two-hander set just before dawn on the back of a council waste disposal truck. Two anonymous garbos trade stereotypically empty assertions of chauvinist masculinity and racist nationalism. Their casually constructed identities are overturned, however, when they discover the body of a young girl, overdosed and crumpled up in one of the garbage bins, and their true natures come out. Short, hard and fast, Garbage would suit independent, student or community theatre production.