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CONTEST
$5.40 – $15.00
A RED DOOR PUBLICATION
A suburban netball team. A new player. Cass says she wants to fit in but if she won’t play by their rules why does she bother coming at all? She claims to see something they cannot, a warning of sorts. All the other women want to do is play. But this player will push each of them to a point of furious revelation.
A sweaty play about the petty and the profound, the mundane and the mythic, Contest asks how we might be with each other if we don’t have to win.
The action takes place over one session. The women enter in their 'ordinary' state, warm up, do drills, play a short and heated game then cool down, and leave.
Throughout this they are grappling with each other and themselves via a combination of short scenes and poetic monologues that shift between the everyday and the epic, revealing the best, worst, most tortured and most tender aspects of their true selves.
Text is to be accompanied by a physical score that each production team should devise. This should test the limits of the actors and provide the audience with an experience of intense physical strain and relief.
Nothing is left on the court once these women have done with their reckonings.
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Casting Notes: The first production of this play was performed by five actors. It could also be adapted to be performed by different sized casts. Because the text is situational and poetic, multiple actors could play each role and / or a combination of solo voice and chorus could perform the work. In the first production this role was played by an actor who is a wheelchair user with an acquired disability. Ideally this would be the case in future productions. If attempts have been made to find an actor with a disability to play the role and no such actor is available, then the role can be adapted for a non-disabled actor. See notes in script to adapt for this instance.
- drama
- 70
- 5 total
- 5 female identifying
- gender, women
- 18+
- adult
- Australian Script Centre
- MONOLOGUES
- GALLERY
- LINKS & DOWNLOADS
- PRODUCTION HISTORY
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Cass
Female | 40s | under 3 minutes
Starts on page 25
EXTRACT: It’s like sometimes the fire is in my mouth. I should just say. When they ask. But I learned the hard way. You want to know? You really want to know?
C (Centre)
Female | 30s | under 3 minutes
Starts on page 49
EXTRACT: We have to help her, you know. Like, everybody needs help and it’s the easiest thing in the world to do. She just needs to ask, let us in. I can do anything, never any bother, never too much trouble. Never, ever, let her, let her what? What? Let her be. Let it be. Stop fussing. Shut up. Oh that’s just … He doesn’t mean it.
REVIEW
THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD, CAMERON WOODHEAD
"Collyer patterns wide-ranging dialogue – we get everything from frank sex confessions to stories of bodily betrayal, from surreal elegy to piteous intimations of domestic violence – into a kind of dream play that, underneath the surface comedy, offers a jarring lens onto gendered experience ..."
REVIEW
CHRIS BOYD, THE AUSTRALIAN
"Collyer’s writing arcs from brutally unromantic to gruffly Âpoetic with some exquisitely confessional exchanges along the way. Jousting dialogue unravels into contemplative soliloquies ... the design sharply — and magically — counterpoints the narrative reality ... production elements resolve and coalesce into something remarkable, even ecstatic."
REVIEW
ROBERT REID, WITNESS PERFORMANCE
"Netball as Homeric battlefield: In Contest, now on at Darebin Arts Speakeasy, the world created by writer Emilie Collyer and director Prue Clark is remarkable: an epic battle worthy of Homer that spills out of, and perfectly captures, formalised physical contest."
REVIEW
MICHAEL BRINDLEY, STAGE WHISPERS
"Contest (the very title open to multiple interpretations) is a highly intelligent, perceptive and deeply felt work, performed by an excellent cast. They bring out all the buried or repressed fears and emotions of their characters, layered into them by the playwright. I hope I won’t put anyone off by saying this is genuinely feminist play which makes its convincing case by being so believable."
REVIEW
LAURA HARTNELL, THEATRE PEOPLE
"...an incisive and moving portrait of five women on a netball team ... The real strength of ‘Contest’ is its physicality. There is something cathartic but also unsettling in seeing women’s sweat pour down their faces, and their muscles shake with effort. This, combined with Collyer’s writing, makes for a dynamic conversation between mind and body, language and motion ..."
REVIEW
LONG FORM RESPONSE FROM GEORGIA SYMONS, COMMISSIONED BY NEW WORKING GROUP
"Contest points to the artificial rigidity of the structures that many of us live within; structures that we can work on escaping and unlearning, even if there is some sense in which this unlearning makes the “normal†of life impossible. The game can’t go on. But perhaps something much more beautiful – and difficult, and honest – can begin."
CONTEST TRAILER
EMILIE COLLYER
Contest World Premiere 25 July - 4 August 2018 Presented by Darebin Arts Speakeasy in association with New Working Group and Bureau of Works
PRODUCTION HISTORY
www.emiliecollyer.com
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