#vanessa bates

Anna Marie by Vanessa Bates

Just hangin' out.

Our very own Vanessa Bates, whose production of Porn.Cake. was part of Griffin Independent this year, has been selected as joint winner of the 2012 NSW Premier's Literary Awards with Joanna Murray-Smith.

Here are the Judges' comments on both winning plays:

'Porn.Cake.'

Judges' comments

Two reasonably well-off couples with no kids in a contemporary city have hit middle-aged ennui. They know the world is complex and full of mysterious things, some of which they have sensed and experienced, but they prefer instead to be gripped by the ephemera of modern living: text messages, cooking shows, affairs, conspicuous consumption, porn fetishes, the temporary wonders of the internet, and so on. Through intimate monologues and the repetition of key phrases and scenes, Bates charts the decline of two interrelated couples as they move from passivity and listlessness, loneliness and disappointment to feelings of deep loss and sadness. Ultimately, however, our quartet garner a glimmer of compassion and understanding, both for themselves and those they profess to love. Honest, often cringe-makingly so, funny and heartbreaking, this play contains writing for the stage of the highest standard. The rhythmic contrasts between the cake scenes and the monologues are refreshing and invigorating — one judge commented that the writing is indeed delicious. What is especially remarkable about the play is its employment of a genuinely innovative and inventive approach to storytelling. Fugue-like in its precision, passages are repeated with variations until a new and richer theme develops. In this sense this is a powerful work for the theatre, one that embraces the notion that a playscript is a blueprint for performance. This is the work of a wise, funny, gifted writer with a highly original mind.

And 'The Gift'

Judges' comments

Two couples meet at an exclusive resort. The older couple are almost retired, comfortable and have his trade machine business to thank for it. The young couple — there because they won a competition — have a young daughter and are trying to make a go of it in the arts, him as a conceptual artist, her as a journalist. They bond over a mutual love of honesty and lack of pretence, though there is a wariness from the older couple, Ed and Sadie, about the worth, sense or point of the young Martin’s choice of career. When Martin saves Ed from a near-drowning, the rich older couple offer to give Martin and Chloe anything they want. Anything. When they meet again in a year’s time, Martin and Chloe tell the childless older couple that what they want is for them to take their four-year-old daughter. Smart, witty and funny, this play takes huge and courageous bites at some contentious aspects of modern living — the self-obsession of the affluent, entitlement with regard to creative self-actualisation, middle-aged marital stasis, pretension and aspiration, and the unchallenged belief that self-fulfillment ranks above all else in the hierarchy of human needs and responsibilities. The combustible combination of all of the above leads us along the path to a shocking moral compromise. It is a very thoughtful, highly intelligent and skilfully crafted play by a writer at the height of her powers.