WORLDS ALIVE is our annual presentation of stage plays from around the world. Most have never been seen before in Australia. Most are from unexpected places. We’ve had interesting entertaining plays from Jamaica, Papua New Guinea, Korea, Indonesia, The Philippines, Brazil, Ukraine, Japan, Iraq and India. 

How do I find these plays? AI is useless. It gives wrong information. Google is helpful.  I simply search, for example, “Ugandan playwrights”. Many  publishing companies have collections of plays, for example, Post-colonial Plays by African Women. I source some from "Words Without Borders", an organisation dedicated to translating important plays to English. 

The  next step is to find about 50 plays that have a small cast size, are entertaining and yet have substance. When that cull gets the list down to about 20 plays, and I start reading. I look for the ones that say something about the county, not something by, for example, a Kenyan who studied in Ireland and then wrote a Kenyan version of Waiting for Godot. Yes, there is one. It’s set at a bus stop where the bus never comes. 

Once I have a good set of plays, I secure the permissions to produce them as a script-in-hand reading.

I then craft WORLDS ALIVE to be about 100 minutes, entice professional actors to read the roles, hire the venue and send out the information via social media and our mailing list. 

Why  do I do all this: Scene Theatre Sydney is keen that Sydneysiders get the best of global theatre. Mostly, I like finding out about other places. And I Iike reading plays.

Carol Dance, Artistic Director, Scene Theatre Sydney.