The Kit Denton award took a Sydney writer to the world, writes Louise Schwartzkoff – Sydney Morning Herald 28 August 2009

SUZIE MILLER’S play Transparency is yet to be seen on stage, so the Sydney writer was astonished when she heard the director Peter Carstairs wanted to turn it into a film.

The play, about a child killer, opens in Belfast on September 26, 2009 before a tour of Northern Ireland, but Carstairs has already begun work on the screenplay, with Tropfest founder John Polson as executive producer.

Carstairs, a former Tropfest finalist and director of the 2007 feature film September, heard about the play when Miller won the $25,000 Kit Denton Fellowship last year. He hopes finish writing in October and begin shooting by the end of next Year.

The story has parallels to the 1993 murder of the British toddler James Bulger by two 10-year-old boys and follows a man who has returned to society after years in juvenile detention.

“It raises a bunch of complex issues that I have never seen explored on screen or stage,” Carstairs says.” It’s easy to label children who commit crimes as monsters when in fact nothing is ever that simple.”

The play has generated international interest in Miller’s work. She developed the scripts with the Irish director Rachel O’Riordan during a placement at London’s National Theatre. After Northern London, possibly at the National.

Another play, Caress/Ache, is being developed by the Olivier award-winning director and choreographer Steven Hoggett for a season in London’s West End and a European tour.

“These ideas start as a cell in my brain, so it’s amazing to see them grow into stories that other people are also excited about.” Miller says.

Miller, a lawyer as well as a playwright, often draws on criminal cases for inspiration. In Reasonable Doubt she examined a relationship between two jury members. In All the Blood and All the Water she looked to the Cronulla riots and her experience in court, where she represented rioters from the opposing sides.

To write Transparency she researched the Bulger case, interviewed childhood offenders and victims of crimes and ‘read so much psychological material it did my head in”.

“It was sometimes a harrowing and hideous process, but it made me see both sides of the story and find the way in the middle that humanises the possibilities,” she says. “The legal story is just the starting point. After a while it changes into something more – a meditation on the human condition.”

Miller still works part-time at the shopfront Youth Legal Centre in Darlinghurst and hopes to continue for as long as possible. “To be honest, there’s something grounding about fighting for underprivileged people,” she says.

“To write about your community you do sometimes actually have to part of the community. I know I can’t do both forever, but you can get a lot done if you keep all your balls in the air.”

See the flyer for Suzie's play here

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.