Current recipients: The R E Ross Trust Playwrights' Script Development Awards

The 2011 winners of The R E Ross Trust Playwrights' Script Development Awards are Jane Montgomery Griffiths, Jane Miller, Peta Brady and Diane Stubbings.

Judges' report

Judges: Maude Davey, Campion Decent, Tom Gutteridge

The judges read a total of 36 plays, demonstrating a diverse range and robust level of playwriting in Victoria. Fifteen plays were considered on the rather long shortlist, which is a testament to the strength of the field. The four winning scripts are ambitious and adventurous works. Each demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of the theatre and what it can do, and yet they are as different from each other as they could possibly be. Their settings traverse the world, from rural Victoria to Moscow, to an indeterminate space and time somewhere between Homer's Greece and a contemporary gated community.

A little piece for her sister, by Jane Montgomery Griffiths, re-imagines the stories of Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra. Jane juxtaposes everyday domesticity with mythic excesses to thrilling effect. Perceptive, precise, and beautifully structured.

True love travels on a gravel road, by Jane Miller, is a very funny riff on choice and broken dreams, set in a photocopy centre in a regional town. Wonderful characters, each with distinct and engaging voices, deliver a bungled heist story that is finally very moving and human. A refreshing Australian comedy.

Although it is exploring familiar ground – two sisters brought together by the death of their grandmother – Strands, by Peta Brady, is marked by beautiful, tough, truthful writing. This is an evocative play about grief, loss and inheritance, with two beautifully drawn characters and deft and confident use of metaphor and meta-theatrical elements.

The parricide, by Diane Stubbings, is a cleverly constructed and theatrically potent play on an epic scale. An accomplished, sophisticated and often gripping meditation on the role of the artist is told through an invented love story between Dostoyevsky and his stenographer. Stubbings demonstrates superb control of the formal elements – dialogue merges with interlocked monologues; biography intersects with invented characters and shifts in time.

The judges would also like to mention two other scripts which deserve commendation: Monica Raszewski's There are trees that are dancers and Trudy Hellier's Memory game.

There are trees that are dancers is ostensibly about little-known Australian artist Sybil Craig. However, it is far from biographical. It is a finely wrought, intensely imagined play about two older idiosyncratic women attempting to define the value of life and art. Fascinating and unpredictable, it conjures a strange, surreal but very vivid world while remaining enigmatic.

Based on recent events about a successful husband found dead after leading a double-life, Memory game is arresting, clear and cleverly theatricalised. A dramatic monologue, in which Hellier makes sophisticated use of a variety of devices to surround the narrator gradually with her history and the evidence of deceit.

About the winners

Jane Montgomery Griffiths

Jane Montgomery Griffiths is an award-winning actor, writer and academic. She wrote Sappho...in 9 fragments, which was short-listed for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, and the play and opera libretto Razing hypatia.

Jane works as a senior drama lecturer at Monash University, and has been invited to PlayWriting Australia's 2011 National Script Workshop to further develop A little piece for her sister.

Diane Stubbings

Diane Stubbings was short-listed for the Rodney Seaborn Playwrights' Award for The parricide, and the Ian Reed Prize for Radio Drama for Woman one woman. She has also been long-listed for the Australian/Vogel Literary Award.

Diane is a graduate of the School of English at the University of New South Wales, and works a book reviewer and manuscript assessor.

Peta Brady

Peta Brady has worked as an actor in film, television and theatre. Her recent television credits include The slap, City homicide and Kath and Kim, and she has performed in the plays Save for crying and The call. She won the Gerda Nicholson Award for an emerging actress for her performance in Love at the 2005 Green Room Awards.

In 2010 Peta wrote and performed in Status update at La Mama, earning two Green Room nominations for best female actor and best new writing for Melbourne stage.

She is participating in the Beson Family Writers Program at Malthouse Theatre.

Jane Miller

Jane Miller is a Melbourne-based writer whose plays have been produced in Australia and internationally.

Jane won the Short & Sweet Theatre's People's Choice award for best overall production in 2006 for Perfect stillness, and made her La Mama debut in 2010 with Happily ever after.