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COLIN DUCKWORTH |
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Nationality: Australian/British Email: Click here to contact Website: n/a |
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Literary Agent: n/a |
Colin Duckworth is an Australian writer, literary critic/historian and broadcaster of wide interests and long practical experience of performance and writing for theatre. He is also a professor at Melbourne University. As writer, actor and/or director, he has been involved in works for radio, television, film and stage in England, Auckland and Melbourne. He was Tibor Kerenyi, the Hungarian vet, in Blue Heelers, and played Fred Parkes the Irish down-and-out and Bishop Dermott in Neighbours, and (on screen) M. Fournier in Scott Murray's Devil in the Flesh and Professor Chessey in Zoltan Fecso's Rooms for Rent. His stage roles include Prospero, George (Who's afraid of V.W.), Elyot (Private Lives) The very successful and well reviewed Stork (Melbourne) productions of his translations/adaptations of Camus' novels, The Misfit and Plague, and of the Marcel and Albertine love story from Proust's A la Recherche du Temps perdu (March-April 2007) were world premieres - as is his upcoming The Lover (adapted from Marguerite Duras' L'Amant and L'Amant de la Chine du Nord. He has written libretti for two very successful children's operas (music by Michael Easton): Beauty and the Beast (VSO, 400 perfs.) and Cinderella and Snuffles (ABC radio and regional theatres). He has completed a third libretto, A King no more, based on Eugene Ionesco's Le roi se meurt, (with music by Michael Bertram). His productions of Walter Dolan's Don't throw Confetti in the Church (La Mama, Melbourne), and of Beckett's En attendant Godot for Melbourne French Theatre, Rockaby and Ohio Impromptu), were Australian premieres. His three novels are Steps to the High Garden (Calder London/Riverrun/NY 1992-4), Digging in Dark Places (Ryan, Melbourne, 1997), and Summer Symphony (BlackPepper, 2005). He is known internationally for major works on the 18th - 20th centuries (especially Voltaire (three critical editions of comedies for the Complete Works), and counter-revolutionary espionage (The D'Antraigues Phenomenon). Flaubert and Renan. Modern absurdist theatre, especially Samuel Beckett (critical edition of En attendant Godot; Beckett and Alienation in Literature; and Angels of Darkness - Beckett and Ionesco), and Jean Tardieu (The Underground Lovers: 12 Experimental Plays). His other books are on Flaubert, Renan, and plurivalent philosophy. His theatre and book reviews, essays, stories and articles have appeared in journals and newspapers in Australia, England, U.S.A., Canada, New Zealand, France, Italy and Germany. He has broadcast talks and interviews on ABC, BBC, 3MBS and New Zealand Radio programmes on a variety of literary, dramatic and political topics. MEMBERSHIPS: Australian Writers' Guild, Australian Society of Authors, Fellowship of Australian Writers, Actors Equity, A.J.A (freelance).
Plays by Colin Duckworth
Marcel and Albertine: Proust on Love | ||
| 1st Produced: | The Stork Hotel Stage, Melbourne | 2007 | ||||
Company: | The Stork Hotel, Melbourne | |||||
| 1st Published: | I don't think it has been published. Try emailing Playwright or Agent where listed at top of page. | ISBN/ASIN: | - | |||
| Music: | - | doollee no | #65016 | |||
To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||||
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Genre: | Drama (95 minutes, 2 Acts) Adaptation | |||||
| Parts: | Male | 1 | Female | 1 | ||
Parts other: | - | |||||
Notes: | Newly translated and adapted from Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du Temps perdu. Colin Duckworth homes in on the great love affair between Marcel and Albertine to produce a skilled and dramatically supple two-hander that contains shards of the original diamond. The Age, 17 March 2007. | |||||
Synopsis: | Marcel, the narrator (not to be confused or equated with his creator), is a very sensitive young man in his early twenties, complex, obsessively possessive and jealous. He aims to be a writer, but no one (including his mistress, Albertine) can see he's actually writing anything much. Of course, the whole novel is slowly taking shape in his (the narrator's) head as the drama develops. Albertine, slightly younger but more worldly, is equally complex - mercurial, intangible and mythomaniac. She hates being 'investigated'. She strives to keep the truths of her intimate life hidden, whereas Marcel is obsessed with finding them out. An explosive mix; Beckett described it as "volcanic". As Edmund Wilson wrote, their relationship is "one of the most original studies of love in fiction". | |||||
Further Reference: | - | |||||
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Misfit, The | ||
| 1st Produced: | The Stork Hotel Stage, Melbourne | 2005 | ||||
Company: | The Stork Hotel, Melbourne | |||||
| 1st Published: | I don't think it has been published. Try emailing Playwright or Agent where listed at top of page. | ISBN/ASIN: | - | |||
| Music: | - | doollee no | #65014 | |||
To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||||
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Genre: | Drama (90 minutes, 2 acts). Adaptation | |||||
| Parts: | Male | 1 | Female | - | ||
Parts other: | - | |||||
Notes: | newly translated and adapted from Albert Camus' L'Etranger. I did my own translation as part of the process of adaptation. Narrative discourse and dramatic discourse require different styles and idioms, even though I took care not to change Camus' overall tenor. The most radical departure in my adaptation - and the break-through when I was wondering how to tackle it - was to present Meursault right from the start in his prison cell, looking back on what brought him to this sad state. Earlier episodes in the novel become flashbacks. The actor will have to be very versatile, playing not only Meursault, but the people who are involved with the trial: his lawyer, a magistrate, the prosecutor, the judge, and the chaplain (who gets sent off with a flea in his ear! Meursault only becomes an "outsider", a stranger to society, when he realises his fate is being decided by people who do not know him and cannot understand him. Hence I call my version of L'Etranger The Misfit . Duckworth has extruded the crystalline beauty of Camus' style, its adamant attention to the importance of bodily life. The Age, 8 May 2005. | |||||
Synopsis: | The action takes place in a prison cell. Meursault, the young prisoner charged with murder, works in an office. His employer likes him, he has friends, including a girl-friend, Marie, who wants to marry him. He has no strong reactions, emotions or opinions about anything or anyone. His story begins on the day he receives a telegram saying his mother has died in the old people's home where she lives. It ends as he is about to be executed. In between he gives his detailed and often wrily humorous account of his life in Algiers, his visit to his mother's funeral, and the unfortunate Sunday when he goes with his rather disreputable friend, Raymond, to the beach. Raymond has a quarrel with some Arabs, Meursault gets involved and shoots one of them. The second half of the novel (and the action of the play) deals with Meursault's arrest, trial and imprisonment. He is astounded that more importance is attached (by his lawyer, the hapless chaplain, and the judge) to his failure to cry at his mother's funeral than to the details of why and how he killed the Arab. He refuses the chance of an appeal on principal. | |||||
Further Reference: | - | |||||
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Plague | ||
| 1st Produced: | The Stork Hotel Stage, Melbourne | 2006 | ||||
Company: | The Stork Hotel, Melbourne | |||||
| 1st Published: | I don't think it has been published. Try emailing Playwright or Agent where listed at top of page. | ISBN/ASIN: | - | |||
| Music: | - | doollee no | #65015 | |||
To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||||
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Genre: | Drama (100 minutes, 2 acts) Adaptation | |||||
| Parts: | Male | 3 | Female | - | ||
Parts other: | doubling | |||||
Notes: | newly translated and adapted from Albert Camus' La Peste. In Duckworth's capable hands Plague remains a brilliantly observed anatomy of human reactions to stress. The Age, 23 Sept. 2006. | |||||
Synopsis: | Plague is the dramatised chronicle of an imaginary outbreak of bubonic plague in Oran (Algiers), in the 1940s. The narrator is Dr Bernard Rieux, a dedicated medic, who observes the progress of the epidemic and the ways 12 other characters react to sudden life-threatening social crisis: talking a lot but doing little, relying on prayer and supplication to a god that seems deaf even to the suffering of innocent children, bureaucratic incompetence disguised as pompous "going by the book", interpretating disasters as divine punishment for our sins. Rieux leads the citizens' revolt against the bacteria that kill indiscriminately, organising health and hygiene squads. Are these the Resistance cells opposing the German Occupation, 1940-45? Or resistance to any form of oppression - religious, political, economic? Or an expression of resistance to the essential absurdity of the human condition: finite in an infinite universe? What would our own response be: to stay and help to overcome it, to be resigned to it and pray it will go away, to welcome it as evidence of God's wrath, to exploit the situation financially, or to try to escape and maybe infect others? | |||||
Further Reference: | - | |||||
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