Tommy Murphy Named Sydney Theatre Company's New Patrick White Fellow

Tommy Murphy has been announced as Sydney Theatre Company's new Patrick White Fellow at a special event at The Wharf on Friday 20 May.

Now in its sixth year, the $25,000 Fellowship is awarded annually to an established playwright in recognition of their excellent body of work and achievements. As well as including a commission from STC, which he will develop during his year-long tenure at STC, the Fellowship provides opportunities for Murphy to share his skills with other playwrights and artists.

Tommy Murphy said: "The Patrick White Fellowship grants everything a playwright ought to need: a desk, a commission, and the encouragement of a theatre company -- a great theatre company -- to get that promised play written and on the stage. It entails so much more. It offers a sense of belonging. We dramatists tend to be lured to our profession via a deep desire to connect with people. We opted for a medium that brings a community together: an audience, and before that collaborators united in a common endeavour. We crave people, yet so much of our time is spent in solitude. I hate that necessary part of the job - just me and the cat. As much as I'll miss Narelle walking on my keyboard, I am delighted with the remedy this fellowship offers to the solitude and the invitation to participate in the life of a company.

"I am particularly excited to be on The Wharf at the outset of Jonathan Church's Artistic Directorship and to be again working alongside Polly Rowe, the STC Literary Manager, who now has a long history nurturing plays in this city. I am immensely grateful for this opportunity and its inducements to get busy," he said.

Previous STC Patrick White Fellows are Raimondo Cortese, Patricia Cornelius, Hilary Bell, Kate Mulvany and Angela Betzien, whose new play The Hanging premieres at STC in July.

Also at the event, Neil Levi was announced as the winner of the 2015 Patrick White Playwrights' Award, receiving a prize of $7,500 for his play, Kin. The evening culminated in a rehearsed reading of the play featuring actors including Danielle Cormack, Yure Covich, Deborah Kennedy, Rebecca Massey and Susan Prior, as part of the Sydney Writers' Festival.

Kin is an absurdist tragedy about who we grieve, how we grieve, and when it might be right to stop. Moving between highly poeticised, rhythmic dialogue and wild, free-flowing monologues, the play tells the story of the tragic collision of two families, of different religions and classes, each of whom holds the other responsible for the death of one of their own.

For this year's Award, 131 scripts were anonymously submitted to readers and judges. The aim each year is to acknowledge a writer whose play is ambitious, demonstrates skilful application of craft and reveals great potential for a stage production.

Tommy Murphy is an award-winning playwright, television and film writer. Holding the Man, Murphy's incredibly successful adaptation for the stage, continues to be produced across the world with upcoming productions in France, USA and Israel. He wrote the screenplay for the recent feature film Holding the Man, for which he was also Associate Producer, and won the Australian Writers' Guild Award and the Film Critics Circle of Australia Award for Best Screenplay. The play won multiple awards including the NSW Premier's Literary Award, the Australian Writers' Guild Award and the Philip Parsons Award. Murphy's play Gwen in Purgatory won the WA Premier's Award and the prestigious Richard Burton Prize.

Murphy was a writer on the highly acclaimed TV drama Devil's Playground (winner Logie Most Outstanding Miniseries or Telemovie and AACTA Best Telefeature or Mini Series) amongst other TV projects.

His upcoming stage works include The Desirables for Black Swan, the state theatre company of Western Australia, and a new play for Belvoir theatre. His adaptation of Lorca's Blood Wedding formed part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Other plays include Troy's House (ACT Young Writer's Award), Strangers in Between (NSW Premier's Literary Award Winner), which opens in a new production this year at London's Kings Head Theatre, and Saturn's Return for STC. He is a graduate of the NIDA directors' course and is also the 2016 Creative Fellow in Drama at the University of Queensland. Tommy Murphy's first play won the Sydney Theatre Company Young Playwrights' Award in 1997.

Neil Levi's other works for the theatre include the play The Slab, the short play Ilich Ramirez Sanchez: Scenes from a Fantasy Life, and "Audition: for Hye Yun," performed in New York City as part of a festival of monologues about the body composed for individual actresses. Neil has an undergraduate degree from University of Western Australia and a MA and PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. He's currently working on a play about political violence in the 1970s, and teaching in the English Department at Drew University in New Jersey.

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