Van Badham

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Van Badham is an Australian playwright. She writes left-wing dramas and comedies.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Background

Van Badham was born Vanessa Badham in Sydney in 1978 [1]. Her mother and father worked in the New South Wales gaming and track industry, with her father eventually working for the registered club industry as a publican. An only child, her family moved around a lot during her childhood and she grew up immersed in an adult culture whose currencies were betting, drinking and sports.

The influence of her unusual upbringing was evident in work presented to her teachers at school. Badham's first script was a second grade assignment to write up the class Nativity Play, which she duly set in the beer garden of a public house with Mary and Joseph ejected by a manager for failing to meet dress regulations [1].

[edit] Education

An observant but shy child, Badham's parents enrolled her in Sydney's Philip Street Theatre drama school. At Philip Street she was tutored by Darrell Hilton, a respected and well-known acting teacher whose previous students included Nicole Kidman. Encouraged by Hilton to develop her writing for the stage, on graduation from high school Badham was admitted into the Creative Writing programme at the University of Wollongong.

While a student she began to publish poetry and short fiction as well as write student dramas. At university, however, her political awareness flowered and she was drawn into involvement with student politics and left-wing activism, and she was elected editor of the Wollongong University Students' Association newspaper, the Tertangala. By 1998, Badham was an avowed anarchist and President of the New South Wales branch of the National Union of Students, caucusing with the radical group known as the Non-Aligned Left.

[edit] Early career

Bruised by the National Union of Students' notorious factional brawling, Badham withdrew from organised political activity to return to campus life and her writing in 1999. That year, she won the Naked Theatre Company's first "Write Now!" play competition and with it both a production of her winning play, The Wilderness of Mirrors, at the Sydney Theatre Company's Wharf studio and mentoring from established Australian playwrights Nick Enright and David Williamson.

The success of The Wilderness of Mirrors (a play about secret service infiltration of an activist organisation, based on Badham' experiences in the NUS) brought her to public attention and she began to stage more work across Australia. By 2001, however, her radical themes and attacks on the Australian establishment had won her little favour with the prevailing conservative political climate in her home country and she relocated to the United Kingdom [2] initially studying at the University of Sheffield.

[edit] Move to UK

In the UK, Badham's work was discovered by the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, in 2001 who staged a collaborative production of Kitchen with company Nabokov in 2001. A play about marriage as a metaphor for capitalism, it then toured to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2002, where it became an instant hit.

Commissions from the Royal Court Theatre [2] and the BBC World Service followed, as did transfers of Kitchen to London and New York as well as six subsequent Edinburgh productions in 2003-2006; Camarilla and Bedtime for Bastards (2003), Nikolina and the subversive children's musical Waitin' 4 Da G (2004 - with music by Jonny Berliner), Petrograd (2005) and Persae (2006).

Camarilla was a critical sensation at the 2003 festival [3] and led to the cementing of Badham's sudden international reputation as a leading proponent of radical political theatre [3]. Badham has since won numerous international awards and her work is now performed all over the world.

[edit] Themes

Van Badham's plays are typically concerned with the legacy of personal and political violence, critiques of Western consumer capitalism, dichotomies of middle- and working-class values, the assigned roles of women in Western Society and the relationship of art to history.

Van Badham's other plays include: We Met at the Demo (1996), Thrown to Earth (1997), Dole Diary (2001), Material Girls (2003), Still Life with a Dead Artist (2004), Letters to W (2004), Bang on the Nerve (2004), Black Hands / Dead Section (2005) and The Gabriels (2006), as well as numerous short works and radio dramas.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Interview with Van Badham. Scully, Jess. SummerWinter magazine, Issue 4, 2006. p56]
  2. ^ http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,21427750-5003423,00.html "Playwrights Exit Stage", The Courier-Mail March 24, 2007
  3. ^ http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/theatre/features/article64615.ece Sierz, Aleks "Dramatic Interventions", The Independent March 17, 2004

[edit] External links

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