The 99 Collection
The 99 Collection is a showcase of the work registered with the Centre in 1998. We have profiled 30 plays representing the diversity of styles and forms reflected in Australian theatre writing. Also included is a summary of all other plays registered with the Centre in that year.
NB: This title is no longer available. Many of the scripts it contained may still be purchased individually.THE PLAYS
Emilie Collyer
Argonauta
Lily is sitting on a beach, looking for a shell. Her world is small, isolated and safe; that's how she likes it. She doesn't 'do' other people, and she's not about to start, or so she thinks. Argonauta is about what happens when... more
Adriano Cugola
Art the Master
A satire on 20th century artistic endeavour using a variation on the Faust myth. Young, ambitious funeral artist Barclay Belaqua rankles under the humiliation of running an unsuccessful funeral parlour. His frustration leads him to... more
Jill Shearer
Catherine
A play within a play. Catherine explores early British settlement of Australia through counterbalancing friction between the present day Director and his wife (playing the convict girl, Catherine) against the story of surgeon Dr... more
Sandra Shotlander
CHRONICLES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
A young woman looks back on her struggle to survive tumultuous times during the French Revolution. It is a fast-paced sweep through French history, from events leading to the fall of the Bastille, to the Terror in 1794. In Brechtian... more
Catherine Zimdahl
CLARK IN SARAJEVO
Clark in Sarajevo is a surreal and poetic play that traces the journey of Clark Cant, a reporter who decides to become a war correspondent in an effort to challenge his ordinariness. He goes to Sarajevo in the middle of the siege,... more
Noelle Janaczewska
Cold Harvest
Cold Harvest explores the rites of passage and dilemmas of an Australian-born second generation of migrants - those caught in the cross-fire between then and now, there and here, us and them.
The play follows the negotiations... more
Steve Taylor
DIY
DIY is not set in any particular time or place. C-Man, retired to a deckchair with his newspaper, is disturbed by the arrival of B-man who begins to build a strange structure nearby. The two, who are initially at loggerheads,... more
Brett Heath
THE EASTER MAN
A man's sanity is in severe doubt when he announces that it was his intention all along to perpetrate a crime in order to be committed to an asylum. It is only here, straightjacketed and incarcerated, that he can release his soul,... more
Michael Li Cha Zi
Every Perfect Gift
A psychological mystery exploring the real effects of violence on an innocent mind. Four actors play eight parts. Tegan is a deeply disturbed young woman - moody, unpredictable and tormented by horrifying dreams -locked in a remand... more
Nick Enright
The Female Factory
A zealous middle-class woman seeks to better the lives and conditions of a group of female convicts in colonial NSW. A child born within the institution tests the convictions of all. more
Michael Kile
The Gambler
The Gambler is an adaptation for the stage of Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1866 novella, The Gambler. It is a satirical drama about addictive gambling, set in the fictional European casino city of Roulettenburg.The play follows the... more
Bruce Mumford
Ghosts
When an avaricious property developer tries to take over an old Australian guest house, she discovers that it is haunted by a variety of ghosts from its past. These include the original owner, who, with the help of some of the other... more
Glen Dolman
I Would Die 4 U
New Year's Eve 2013. The end of the unluckiest year in history and maybe the end of the world. For six friends, it's a good excuse for a party. But when a dead body enters the equation, the bounds of love, friendship and reality... more
Jacinta Legge-Wilkinson
IN ABSENTIA
It is 1975 and Nick is dead. The favourite son of Brenda and Neil. The family has suppressed all emotional response at losing him through suicide two years earlier. On this night all suppressed emotion will erupt, provoked by the... more
Susan Rogers
Invertebrate Trilogy
Three short pieces linked by ideas rather than by characters. Metamorphosis, desire, loss. The flight/transformation/death of a woman is alluded to in each piece. Death as the expression of mortality (Beetle). Death as departure... more
A.F Lall
The Last Time I Saw Calvin
Ray and Peter, long-time lovers, host a posthumous 40th birthday party for Calvin, who recently died from AIDS. Over the course of one emotional and alcohol-fuelled evening six of his closest friends joke, bicker and bitch, as the... more
Niamh Kearney
THE MAZE
Cynthia is desperate to get all the excitement that life can offer her. When school, home and her social life seem to shut that excitement out, she plunges into the darker side of life, a self-perpetuating chaos of rebellion and... more
Duong Le Quy
Meat Party
A woman returns to the place of her father's death during the Vietnam war as a way of rediscovering both her father and herself. Hoping to find a nation reconciled with the past and living for the future, she finds the scars of war... more
Merlinda Bobis
Ms Serena Serenata (Part 1 of War Trilogy)
A naturalistic play with magical realist elements. It tells the tale of a Filipino war veteran who serenades an Australian grandmother. (Part 1 of War Trilogy ). Variable cast. Some are just voices. more
Christine Evans
MY VICIOUS ANGEL
My Vicious Angel is a one act-play set in a kind of haunted hospital. Pearl is a trapeze artist who has fallen and broken her spine; Merle her dead twin sister who died in a fire. Through Merle's at first unwelcome visitations,... more
Angela Costi
Panayiota
Lisa Harris has organised a reunion with two high school girlfriends she hasn't wanted anything to do with for the past ten years. Both girlfriends, Stella and Silvana, are unaware that their old girlfriend Athena Harismiadis is now... more
Barry Kay
Precious
Precious is a highly physical comedy satire about Gus, a girl with an intellectural disability. Gus's parents are inventors who have devoted their lives to creating devices to protect Gus. They have to move to a new house and Gus... more
Merlinda Bobis
Promenade (Part 3 of War Trilogy)
Promenade, which is poetry and dance, explores the root and aftermath of different kinds of war. Utilising music and spectacle, it explores how the excessive attachment to one's racial, cultural or ideological identity can easily... more
P. P. Cranney
Rated X
Rated X is a performance which explores the often taboo subject of youth depression and its dire consequence - suicide. This is a narrative play which focuses on the lives of three teenagers and how they deal with the different... more
Merlinda Bobis
Rita's Lullaby (Part 2 of War Trilogy)
A drama which blends poetry with naturalism. It is about Manila's street children who have survived militarisation yet are prostituted by both the East and the West.
(Part 2 of War Trilogy.) Stage and Radio versions available. more
Les Winspear
ROBIN HOOD AND HIS MERRY BAND
Frustrated by Robin Hood in his attempts to collect taxes, the Sheriff of Nottingham decides to build a ring-road around Sherwood Forest and charge everyone a toll for using it. With his new-found wealth he wants to construct the... more
Andrea Lemon
Rodeo Noir
Mickey is a cowgirl...a rodeo rider...and the best son her dad ever had. Now she wants to ride the broncs, but the Ladies' Bronc Ride was outlawed thirty years ago. Mickey's mum Nel, died when she was six. But when Mickey finds a... more
Chris Thompson
Shady Characters
Bernie Bone's imagination has run away from him. It's been happening a while - since his mum and dad split up and he had to leave the big house with the yard to come and live in the small flat across the road from the factory. ... more
Michael Costello
Waiting Rooms
Three separate yet interconnecting monologues that present, with both sensitivity and humour, the vulnerability, isolation, loneliness, determination and survival of its three characters in today's cities.
'Little Boy Lost' -... more
Jodi Gallagher
Web
Martin is a demagogue on the rise, a man whose dangerous fascination is matched by an underlying lack of definition. Louise and Lissa, childhood friends, are both in love with him, or in love with the idea of him, or in love with the... more
Sarah Brill
Who the Fuck is Erica Price
Erica Price is a lonely poet and a busy prostitute. In her desperation for companionship she dreams of a better world. In her fight for the revolution she is struggling to be free. Through observation and experience Erica constructs... more
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