Thousands of students were outside Parliament in Wellington on Friday for the School Strike 4 Climate protest. The core team organising were aged between 14 and 17 and their overarching theme "Don't Fast Track Our Future" was in response to the government's launch in February of a regime aiming to allow major infrastructure projects to be built more quickly and easily.
Which makes some arts news this weekend rather timely.
Alex Medland has this weekend won multiple national awards for a play described by the judges as a "playful, unnerving and brilliant commentary on climate activism and inaction". Medland's We're Gonna Kill Billy revolves around a group of teenagers who have kidnapped the grandson of New Zealand's richest man to protest a marina being built in the Hauraki Gulf. They are trying to save the world.
At just 24 years old, Alex is the youngest winner of the Adam New Zealand Play Award in the award's 18 year history. It is awarded to an unproduced play, Medland's play also won this weekend Best Play by a Māori Playwright and Best Play by a Woman Playwright.
Clearly a playwright on the rise, last year Medland won the national Playwrights b4 25 competition for her play Becoming Jeff Bezos, described by the organiser of all of these awards Playmarket as a gleeful skewering of late-stage capitalism.
Of Kāi Tahu, Alex Medland trained as an actor at the John Bolton Theatre School in Melbourne, and has been a member of both Auckland Theatre Company's Youth Company and Writer's Table. She is currently based in Edinburgh where she produces new work with her new New Zealand theatre company Half Trick Theatre, which is dedicated to making irreverent reinventions of classic works - like a take last year on Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus.
