The Prop: On Playwrights

The Prop: On Playwrights Podcast presents long-form conversations with exciting, established and eminent Australian playwrights. It also analyses a scene of the playwright’s work, as performed by great Sydney-based actors.
Mary Anne Butler is a playwright based in Darwin, in the Northern Territory. She has been a dramatist her whole life, but rose to prominence with her play, Highway of Lost Hearts, which told the story of a woman who had lost her heart, and her ability to feel, after the death of a close friend in a boating accident. In the play, the woman begins a journey across the country with her trusted companion, her dog. Along the way, through the people she meets and the situations she encounters, she re-finds her heart, piece by piece until she reaches the coast and is able to let go of the friend she has lost and to forgive herself. It’s powerful piece of work, about grief and loss and forgiveness.

In 2016, Mary Anne had an absolute cracker of a year. For her play Broken, she was the winner of the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Drama, which is one of the most significant recognitions a playwright can receive in this country. The play was also awarded the Northern Territory Literary Award for Best Script. She then went on to win the Victorian Prize for Literature – the FIRST playwright ever to do so.

Her most recent play, Cusp, which was given a development reading at the 2018 National Play Festival was written in response to the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre, and the scandalous treatment of the inmates there.Cusp focuses on the lives of three young people in the Territory, the expectations that society places on them, and the fragility of their existence.

Her play The Sound Of Waiting, will open in April 2018 at the Eternity Playhouse. Her award winning play Broken was staged there in 2016, and, like Broken, TheSound Of Waiting has been nominated for another prestigious playwriting award, in this case the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Playwrighting – The Nick Enright Prize. The Sound Of Waiting brings Mary Anne’s dramatic scrutiny to bear on the issue of Asylum Seekers and Refugees, the so-called “boat people” who have been used as political footballs for the last two decades of Australia’s Federal Politics. The play tells the story of a man and his daughter’s escape from their country to Australia by boat, and uses the breathtakingly clever device of the Angel Of Death to indict us all in the tragedy of all those many lives lost at sea. It is gripping and unflinching in its portrayal of the desperation of the world’s most vulnerable people, and further proves Mary Anne Butler’s brilliance as a playwright of great compassion and intelligence.

Mary Anne is a strong advocate for regional writers and writing and in particular for the Northern Territory, both in its Top End and Alice Springs writing communities. She has been persuasive in her arguments about the need for the East Coast metropolitan centres to be aware and receptive to the bold stories being told from places like the Territory.

She is a teacher, a mentor, and a cultural leader in Australia.