By Garry Maddox, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 August 2009

A PLAY inspired by the Bill Henson photographic controversy and a film written by a man who suffered severe burns as a child are among the four finalists for this year's Kit Denton Fellowship.

The $25,000 award, named after the late writer and father of Andrew Denton, honours courage and excellence in performance writing and is designed to help develop a project into a marketable script.

Robert Reid, a playwright and the artistic director of the Melbourne's Theatre in Decay, is shortlisted for The New Black, a satire inspired by last year's furore over Henson's photographs of a naked teenage girl.

''I'm infuriated by stupidity. While the issues around it are extraordinarily complex, I was very driven to make a moral judgment on the people who barely even looked at the photo, much less did any research on the idea or the concepts, and simply took the received opinion,'' Reid says of his play.

He hopes the work, which centres on a risque office email, will get a theatrical run as a result of the shortlisting.

Also on the shortlist is the Sydneysider Karl Madderom, who suffered burns to half his body in a car fire when he was two. The fire killed two other children and left Madderom in hospital for five years.

''It was thought one of the kids was playing with matches,'' he says. ''When our babysitter came back, she discovered the car was on fire and we were all trapped.''

Madderom's script, Face Value, is about a badly burnt man trying to fit into society. ''I've taken my own experiences and put them into the character and the story,'' he says. ''They always say write what you know about.''

The photographer and short-filmmaker wants to star in the film rather than use an actor with prosthetics or make-up. ''It's been done. There was Mask, The Elephant Man, there was Man Without A Face and The English Patient.

''What hasn't been tapped into is somebody like me playing that character and not needing make-up. It would be nice to be able to do that - and hopefully do it well - to send a message to say 'I'm just like anyone else'.''

The other contenders are Lisa Hoppe, Bobbie Waterman and the Lateline reporter Margot O'Neill for a planned documentary based on the book Blind Conscience about advocates for refugee rights, and the Geelong group Back to Back Theatre, which features actors with intellectual disabilities, for the play Ganesh vs the 3rd Reich.