VDL Awards Entries 2024

Admissions is a scorching satire that holds a mirror up to privilege and power through the lens of the education system. It is both deliberately provocative and caustically funny as it takes a subversive side-swipe at hypocritical good intentions.

Sherri Rosen-Mason is head of admissions at an exclusive Prep school in New England; her husband Bill is the principal. They are passionately committed to increasing the number of students at the school from culturally and linguistically varied backgrounds, and they’re starting to see results. But when their only son sets his sights on an Ivy League university, personal ambition collides with progressive values, with powerful results. A no-holds-barred look at privilege, power, and the perils of hypocrisy. Admissions is a biting comedy that asks audiences to question just how far they are willing to go to see the change they want in the world.

Set in Hallett Cove, a working class suburb of Adelaide, the Price family – Mum, dad and four siblings are close and loving. The children have aspirations beyond the established comfort of home of course and these desires lend a complexity to the otherwise straightforward life led by Mum and Dad . This is a poignant and complex story of love and devotion.

Local Bendigo novelist, Colin King, set his first published novel in the Bendigo / Heathcote area.
It tells the story of Detective Sargeant Rory James, just back from stress leave, being assigned a cold case.
He walks into the Heathcote winery to interview the woman who found the body 14 years ago.
Problem is, she’s discovered another body this morning.

The story tips back and forth between the current day’s death, the death fourteen years ago, and the 1860’s gold rush.
Were they both accidents?
Were they both murders?
Who would kill for a Heathcote Shiraz?

This play tells of the loves, fears and joys of a Newcastle family during World War Two.

Helen is stoical, self-effacing and walks with a limp; her grandfather Andie recruits mourners to attend the burial of his dog; her devout Catholic mother frets about the local priest’s health; her father serenades an unwilling audience with popular songs; and younger sister Joyce dithers over a marriage proposal.
They all try their best to get on with their lives while the bombs fall around them.

Brian Friel’s Olivier Award-winning play is an astonishing evocation of a family’s world on the brink of change.

It’s harvest time in County Donegal, Ireland, 1936.

Outside the village of Ballybeg, the five Mundy sisters battle poverty to raise seven-year-old Michael and care for their brother, ‘Uncle’ Jack.

During the Festival of Lughnasa, Pagan and Christian meet and collide. The sisters fight each other, love each other, dance, yearn and survive.