The winner for this award is chosen by Pulitzer and Nobel Prize judges and will be presented to Alana in Dublin this month. The STAGE award is coveted among playwrights for the prestige and opportunities it brings, as well as for its sizeable $10,000 prize. In tandem with the award ceremony in October, there will be a staged reading of the winning play performed by professional Irish actors at Trinity College Dublin’s Samuel Beckett Theatre. The BBC World Service Science in Action radio program has been following the STAGE Competition through its entire fifth cycle. The latest instalments in the BBC series featured interviews with the finalists.
Alana Valentine has had strong connections with Redfern since her childhood. Her grandparents met and married on Redfern Street then moved to Kogarah with the help of a loan from the Colonial Sugar Refinery in Pyrmont, for which her grandfather worked. He was also a Souths Junior Player. She went to St George Girls High, a selective school.
When she began her tertiary education at the University of Technology, Sydney, with a degree in Communication, she was the first person in her family to go to university. After that she did the NIDA playwriting course and then, much later, a Museum Studies Post-Graduate Diploma at the University of Sydney, including provenance, diversity, conservation and history.
Her first play, in 1985, was produced by the Australian Theatre for Young People and was included in the Festival of Sydney in 1986. Since then she has written and produced more than 23 plays, as well as short commissioned pieces for various cultural institutions. She was attracted to playwriting by its freedom to be creative, as well as to support herself.
Alana is, of course, very excited by the award – “gobsmacked” was her initial response – and also by the thought of the presentation in Dublin. She sees herself as a modest ambassador for Australian arts. She will, however, resist any suggestion that Australian didgeridoo music should be included in the presentation, as she thinks that, as a non-Indigenous person, that would be culturally inappropriate.
In her play Ear to the Edge of Time, a contemporary radio astronomer faces a desperate crisis about gender politics, attribution, and the role of teamwork in 21st century science. The play deals with the fascinating machinations of astronomical physics, as well as the dilemmas, compromises and culture that are part of scientific discovery. She says that she is expressing in a metaphor the question: “How long, in a world of 7 billion people, can we continue to hold onto the idea that we are simply individuals?” She points out that modern science, as well as all sorts of other human endeavour, is done in groups – we build on each other’s work. We shouldn’t be so obsessed by heroic individualism, but rather appreciate the diversity of human existence and its infinite complexity.
“Together we can” is, for Alana, the deepest truth.
In that spirit, we know that the people of South Sydney will celebrate her achievement and her award!
