Meet Adam – it’s his fault whenever his football team loses, Angelina who sabotages her ballet classmates, Billy who can’t sit still, Dora who has decided it’s time to fall in love, Kathy who knows her own mind when it comes to fashion, Alice who starts a campaign to save the apricot tree in her backyard and Armellieery who has friends named ‘Palooma, Cheetah and Paisleee with three e’s’. These are a few of the characters who appear in One – a book of monologues for young performers.There are 81 solos in One. They are sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, sometimes magical and sometimes daring – each with something different to offer young people looking for dramatic content that is relevant, engaging and challenging. These performers may be studying Drama at secondary Colleges, university Performing Arts courses, Youth Theatre companies or preparing for eisteddfods and community events.The monologues here will also appeal to teachers of theatre and drama and prove useful in classes based on character and voice development, the use of dramatic elements and stagecraft, use of space, actor-audience relationships and the study of important theatrical theorists. These works will reward ‘digging’ beneath the surface to discover suggested or hidden meaning. One may also appeal to more mature readers and those with a love of theatre.Chris Dickins is a playwright, theatre director and teacher who has been working in the Performing Arts since 1973. He is a prolific playwright having written around 90 plays – many of which have been specially commissioned for small community companies. Chris’ plays have been produced across Australia and Internationally; been studied for VCA Drama courses; used as teaching resources at universities and at NIDA and have been nominated for Victorian Green Room awards. In 1993 Chris represented Australia at the five writers from five Nations ASSITEJ international congress (the children’s theatre branch of UNESCO) in Frankfurt, Germany where his theories on theatre were adopted into ASSITEJ archives. Chris shares his life with wife Christine and lives in the rural artisan village of Fish Creek, Victoria, Australia.
Chris Dickins is a writer and theatre director who lives in rural Victoria, Australia. He has written over 100 plays and many of these have been performed across Australia. A couple have been performed internationally. Chris was the Australian writer at the 1993 ASSITEJ Five Writers from Five Nations conference held in Frankfurt, Germany. Chris has taught drama and theatre in Australian schools and universities for 40 years and has recently written several novels. He is married to theatre director and actor, Christine Skicko, and has one son, Tom, who is a musician and festival director.
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“The world is full of monologues. People telling their stories to anyone who will listen… even our minds are monologues.” So says Missy in The Monologue Monologue, one of the eighty-one works in One; playwright Chris Dickens’ new collection of solo pieces for young performers. Unlike the kind of monologue collections that offer excerpts from full length plays, these are effectively self-contained short stories and character sketches that ask the performer to not only learn, speak and embody the words on the page, but to use their imaginations to augment those words with backstory and context interpreted from the circumstances and situations each solo piece implies. As Dickens says in his “Dear Reader’ preface; “These works… require ‘digging’ beneath the surface to discover suggested or hidden meaning.”
For the most part, these solo pieces are delivered in direct-address, storytelling style to a generic audience that is not endowed with any specific character or context. In some cases, though, there are opportunities for the more adventurous performer to choose works that require them to play more than one character, or to imbue the space with a more interactive manifestation of an enrolled audience or unseen characters. In Australian Army ABC for instance, the performer must find voices for twenty-five different characters of different ages, eras and genders. In I, The Phone, the character of Charlotte creates for the audience a whole coterie of friends who are linked through the ubiquitous presence in the space and on screens. In Mr Football, the performer must endow the audience as members of the local footy team to whom he (Travis) must make an abject apology for bad behaviour. In Liars, Cheats and A’holes, the performer must bring to life characters on the other end of the phone as Rex, an unscrupulous real estate agent does his dodgy deals. And in Daydreamer, the performer must keep changing the context within which the audience is endowed as Rhiannon makes a series of fantasy speeches for a number of different fantasised achievements.
As a bonus, each monologue is accompanied by lovely, evocative original illustrations or paintings by the author himself, offering an additional visual stimulus for the way in which the solo piece might be approached.
In some ways it would have been a simpler task for Dickens to revisit his impressive body of more a hundred plays written over a period of fifty years for young people and young audiences as a source for the extraction of more traditional monologues to make up a collection like this. The fact that he’s chosen, instead, to apply his many years of experience to the task of developing these new works means that young performers are offered a wealth of characters and scenarios that have both a freshness and the trade-mark warmth and empathy that Dickens always brings to his writing of young characters. Any young performer (or drama teacher, for that matter) would be hard pressed not to find something here for which they feel an affinity and a connection that will inspire them to bring Chris Dickens’ words to life.
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Chris Dickins has produced what every school drama teacher craves: a book of monologues specifically written, and eminently suitable for young performers. The characters are recognisable and age appropriate, the language is accessible, and each monologue has its own narrative arc and emotional journey. Some pieces deal with everyday life, family, and school, while others approach more difficult predicaments experienced by young people. Dickins’ diverse monologues provide plenty of scope for young performers to explore script and character analysis, acting, voice and movement techniques, actor-audience relationships, and stagecraft.
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Chris Dickins has produced what every school drama teacher craves: a book of monologues specifically written and eminently suitable for young performers. The characters are recognisable and age-appropriate, the language is accessible, and each monologue has its own narrative arc and emotional journey. Some pieces deal with everyday life, family, and school, while others approach more difficult predicaments experienced by young people. Dickins’ diverse monologues provide plenty of scope for young performers to explore script and character analysis, acting, voice and movement techniques, actor-audience relationships, and stagecraft.
Kate Herbert
Playwright, Theatre Reviewer - Theatre Arts Teacher
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The world is full of monologues. People telling their stories to anyone who will listen… even our minds are monologues.” So says Missy in The Monologue Monologue, one of the eighty-one works in One; playwright Chris Dickens’ new collection of solo pieces for young performers. Unlike the kind of monologue collections that offer excerpts from full length plays, these are effectively self-contained short stories and character sketches that ask the performer to not only learn, speak and embody the words on the page, but to use their imaginations to augment those words with backstory and context interpreted from the circumstances and situations each solo piece implies. As Dickens says in his “Dear Reader’ preface; “These works… require ‘digging’ beneath the surface to discover suggested or hidden meaning.”
For the most part, these solo pieces are delivered in direct-address, storytelling style to a generic audience that is not endowed with any specific character or context. In some cases, though, there are opportunities for the more adventurous performer to choose works that require them to play more than one character, or to imbue the space with a more interactive manifestation of an enrolled audience or unseen characters. In Australian Army ABC for instance, the performer must find voices for twenty-five different characters of different ages, eras and genders. In I, The Phone, the character of Charlotte creates for the audience a whole coterie of friends who are linked through the ubiquitous presence in the space and on screens. In Mr Football, the performer must endow the audience as members of the local footy team to whom he (Travis) must make an abject apology for bad behaviour. In Liars, Cheats and A’holes, the performer must bring to life characters on the other end of the phone as Rex, an unscrupulous real estate agent does his dodgy deals. And in Daydreamer, the performer must keep changing the context within which the audience is endowed as Rhiannon makes a series of fantasy speeches for a number of different fantasised achievements.
As a bonus, each monologue is accompanied by lovely, evocative original illustrations or paintings by the author himself, offering an additional visual stimulus for the way in which the solo piece might be approached.
In some ways it would have been a simpler task for Dickens to revisit his impressive body of more a hundred plays written over a period of fifty years for young people and young audiences as a source for the extraction of more traditional monologues to make up a collection like this. The fact that he’s chosen, instead, to apply his many years of experience to the task of developing these new works means that young performers are offered a wealth of characters and scenarios that have both a freshness and the trade-mark warmth and empathy that Dickens always brings to his writing of young characters. Any young performer (or drama teacher, for that matter) would be hard pressed not to find something here for which they feel an affinity and a connection that will inspire them to bring Chris Dickens’ words to life.
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