The heats of Short and Sweet for 2010 are now over, and the plays have been selected that will compete in the Grand Final that will take place at the Parade Theatre, NIDA on Saturday 13th March.

I got around to seeing the last set of ten plays at the NIDA Parade Playhouse theatre. As always, the playwrights were inspired to write by some very different subject matters.

Going through the plays these were the subjects; ‘The Resistable Rise of Verity Devlin’ by Peter Lewis- a wry, satirical look at one of Sydney’s most controversial, right wing columnists, Swingtime’s ‘Patrami’- a take on a park bench encounter with terrorist overtones, Ric Herbert’s ‘Thanks for Playing’- a provocative take on a busker’s life from the inside, with the twist that the busker suffers from mental illness, Peter Malicki and Lincoln Hall’s Going Down- this is a very different black comedy take on the often used scenario of a group of people stuck together in a lift that breaks down, Sonal Moore’s ‘Black Water’- a very poignant and well played look at a couple coping with the reality that one partner now has major disabilities as a result of serious brain damage that took place with a car accident.

‘Seven Jewish Children: A Play For Gaza’, the eminent British playwright Caryl Churchill’s controversial take on the Israeli military strike on Gaza in 2008/2009, kicked off the second half. Gerry Greenland’s clever ‘Reading Harold Pinter’ tied in the writings of Pinter with the breakdown of a relationship between two middle-aged women. Craig Delahoy’s ‘The Joy Of Id’ was another clever, whimsical piece, this inspired by that great, eccentric Viennese psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, featuring a young woman and man in a library setting wondering whether they should chatting each other up. One suspects that Robert Ballinger must have acquired some courtroom experience in writing his piece ‘Apology Accepted’ featuring two lawyers going to mediation with their clients over an insurance claim only to see that their clients take over the case! Edward Albee’s (yes the great American dramatist) ‘The Sandbox’ was a perplexing play about families.

From the night the judges chose Carol Churchill’s controversial Gaza play to go through to the finals. Churchills’s play joins Carl Sorheim’s ‘It’s All The Rage’, Nir Shelter’s and Terrence Foltyn’s ‘Life of Death’, Angie Farrow’s ‘Lifetime’, Frank Legget’s ‘Mr & Mrs Metcalfe enjoy the Music of Elton John’, Jane Miller’s ‘Perfect Stillness’, Tim Hehir’s ‘Pride and Prejudice in ten minutes flat’, Pat Brennan’s ‘Putting Your Best Foot Forward’, Elaine Romero’s ‘Rain Of Ruin’, Caryl Churchill’s ‘Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza’, Steven McGrath’s ‘Taking A Bullet’, David Ritchie’s ‘Thin Air’, and Mark Andrew’s ‘Tipping Point’ in the finals on Saturday the 13th March.