Awards and judging
With a $1900 prize pool, prizes will be awarded for Outstanding Play Performance, Outstanding Actor and Youth Actor Encouragement.
The One Act Play festival is conducted in contest form with a panel of suitably qualified judges who have expertise and experience in the performing arts. The judges will not confer about the plays or actors before they have given their final rankings.
Award for Outstanding Play Performance
All performances will be reviewed based on the following artistic elements:
- Characterisation
- Plot
- Dialogue
- Staging.
Awards for Outstanding Actor and Youth Actor Encouragement
All performances will be reviewed based on the following criteria:
- Role identification
- Vocal expression
- Vocal projection
- Spontaneity
- Actor collaboration
- Emotional believability
- Movement and bodily expression
- Spirit.
An actor cannot win more than one award.
Our judges
Augusta Supple
Augusta is an award-winning western Sydney-based creative producer and theatre director specializing in developing new work and multi-playwright productions. She has commissioned and produced more than 200 of Australia’s leading and emerging playwrights, pioneering collaborative play generators, new work festivals and creative developments in Australia, the USA and Canada.
She was the Artistic Director of Brand Spanking New: a festival of New Australian Writing (New Theatre), Creative Director of Stories from the 428 (Side Track Theatre), Festival Co-Director of Mayday Playwrights Festival (Tap Gallery Theatre), Director/ Creative Producer of Singled Out (Seymour Centre), Director/Producer of A View from Moving Windows (Riverside Theatre), No Guns, Nudity or Naked Flames (7-On Playwrights), Director of I Contain Multitudes (Old 505 Theatre). She has led new play generators for the American Playwrights Center in Minneapolis and recently in Parramatta for WestWords.
More information about Augusta can be found: www.augustasupple.com
Charley Allanah
Charley trained at Adelaide College of Arts, NIDA, and with SITI Company NYC. She founded and was artistic director of Adelaide collective Early Worx, where acclaimed productions including Seven Jewish Children and Love Child earned early recognition and the Adelaide Critics Circle's Emerging Artist of the Year 2011.
In 2015, she co-founded House of Sand with choreographer Eliza Sanders. The company creates multi-artform contemporary performance, from pure dance to multi-media immersions, new Australian plays like Sarah Hamilton's The Split (2019), contemporary classics including Stephen Sewell's Welcome The Bright World (w STCSA, 2018) and the cutting edge of globally playwriting, such as Alice Birch’s feminist polemic REVOLT. SHE SAID. REVOLT AGAIN.(2018). The epic That Was Friday (co-authored by Charley, Eliza Sanders, Jack Sulivan and Amrit Tohari) premiered in 2022, praised as "collaborative theatre at its most honest, most revealing and beautifully performed" and award-winning current work Manage Your Expectations tours throughout 2025.
Recently, Charley has returned to acting and her writing practice has gained recognition. She was understudy to the author in the lead role of Glace Chase’s Triple X for Sydney Theatre Company, and appeared as High Priestess Charmian in Come you Spirits radical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra at Chatswood Concourse. Her play Stable was long listed for the ‘24 Griffin Award, and The House Collector was performed in reading directed by Sheridan Harbridge in ‘23.
Current projects include Must Go On, a pop sci-fi musical with Nick Delatovic in development with Canberra Theatre Centre, and Life & Law: Transgender Stories, a new work of theatrical storytelling premiering in Sydney in 2025.
Adam Deusien
Adam Deusien is a director and theatre maker with over 15 years’ experience in creating original narrative driven performance, adaptations of canonical texts and contemporary performance, in Bathurst, regional NSW.
As the Artistic Director of Lingua Franca, Adam has worked extensively with Local Stages, Bathurst’s Performing Arts Development Program. In recognition of his work in regional Australia Adam was awarded the CreateNSW Regional Arts Fellowship in 2016, and in 2017 continued this work as Artistic Associate with the Bathurst Memorial Entertainment Centre. In 2018 he was appointed Artistic Director/Director of the Arts Program for Artstate, New South Wales regional arts festival and conference. In 2019 he was the recipient of a Sandra Bates Director’s Award with Ensemble Theatre. He has worked as Manager of New Work and Sector Engagement at Canberra Theatre Centre and is currently the Creative Director of the Enlighten Festival, Canberra.