Biography of Van Badham

Van Badham was born in Sydney, Australia, the only child of working-class parents. As a teenager, she trained as an actor at the Philip Street Theatre. While there she began to write sketches and short pieces and was encouraged to develop her writing by drama teacher, Darrell Hilton, who also taught Nicole Kidman. At eighteen, she enrolled in the Creative Writing degree programme at the University of Wollongong and began to write full-length works for the stage. At university, her political awareness grew and she wrote less as she devoted more time to left-wing political activism. She became President of the National Union of Students in 1998. Disillusioned by her involvement in factional politics, Badham returned to writing and began to use her insights into political behaviour in her work. The Wilderness of Mirrors, about secret service infiltration of an activist organisation, won the first Naked Theatre Company young writers' competition in 1999, and was based on her own experiences of infiltration in the student movement. In 2001, Badham left Australia, frustrated by both a conservative Australian political climate and the "self-censorship" of state-funded theatre responding to the political regime. She arrived in the UK to study at the University of Sheffield and her first British show, Kitchen, was produced at Sheffield's Crucible Theatre soon afterwards. A vicious, satirical take on labour relations and global capitalism, Kitchen announced the distinctive voice, uncompromising political themes and razor-sharp wit that have become trademarks of her work. The play sold out at the Edinburgh Festival in 2002 and subsequently transferred to London and New York. In 2003, a production of her short works, Bedtime for Bastards, appeared in London and Edinburgh to great controversy. Badham's dark depiction of US Marines committing human rights abuses in an Afghani jail provoked walkouts and front-page outcry and prompted the US Embassy to issue a statement denying the play had any basis in fact. The Scotsman noted, "this play is a wonderful antidote for the dangerous, empty-headed and jargon riddled times we live in - the word audacious does not come close." Camarilla, a study of domestic terrorism and the anxieties of New Labour Britain, was a critical and popular hit at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2003, cementing her reputation as a leading proponent of contemporary political theatre. "Stunning," wrote Johann Hari in The Independent "She makes a dazzling, terrifying case that has to be answered. Badham predicts that a new generation of Baader-Meinhof Gangs may be about to rise. If they do, she will provide their most eloquent and dangerous voices." Badham has since won numerous awards in both Australia and the UK and her work is now performed all over the world. In 2004, her short play An Anarchist at Dinner won Best Play at the Short & Sweet International Short Play Festival in Sydney and transferred to The Sydney Opera House, while Nikolina premiered in Edinburgh and won her the Fringe Report Playwright of the Year Award and a commendation in the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Awards. More recent plays have included Petrograd (about the death of Soviet idealism), Persae (an anti-Iraq-War adaptation of Aeschylus' The Persians) and the award-winning Black Hands / Dead Section (about Germany's Baader-Meinhof movement), as well as radio dramas for the BBC. She returns to the University of Wollongong every year to run a specialist theatre-writing summer school. Van Badham's plays are typically concerned with the politics and legacy of violence, dichotomies of middle- and working-class values, the social roles of women in Western society and the relationship of art to history.
Quotes:
"Try being a capitalist prick when your shit's on fire" - Black Hands / Dead Section
."The middle-class fetishize violence because they've never had to live with it" - Black Hands / Dead Section
"Offer people a choice between their principles or their job and it doesn't matter what they take because either way they're broken." - Kitchen
"No sweetness, no service" - Kitchen Typical conservative - uses his own frustrations as an excuse to dump shit on the rest of the world. - Camarilla
"When a government makes non-violent political action untenable, they make violent political action inevitable." - Van Badham
"It is my own experience of violence that makes me so opposed to its political use. That goes equally for terrorism as for the imperialist wars of Western states." - Van Badham
"Structure is more important than content in the transmission of information."- Abbie Hoffman