RGM Artist Group

CATHERINE ZIMDAHL

Catherine Zimdahl is a playwright and screenwriter. Her play Clark In Sarajevo premiered at the Griffin Theatre Company in Sydney in 1998. In 1998, Clark In Sarajevo received the Legal & General Umbrella Award for Best New Australian Writing, and in 1999 won the Louis Esson Prize for Drama at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, and the ANPC/New Dramatists Exchange to New York.

Catherine's one-act play Family Running For Mr Whippy has had many productions, including those by the Sydney Theatre Company and the Melbourne Theatre Company. In 1995 it was shortlisted for Best New Play at the Green Room Awards in Victoria. Both Clark In Sarajevo and Family Running For Mr Whippy have been adapted for ABC Radio.

Catherine is a Screenwriting graduate of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, where she wrote the short features Sparks and Life On Earth As I Know It. In 1990 Sparks received AFI awards for Best Short Film and Best Short Screenplay, the Gold Plaque Award from Chicago International Film Festival and Le Prix Recherché from the Clermont Ferrand Film Festival. Sparks and Life On Earth As I Know It have both been screened on Channel 4 in the U.K. and at numerous festivals.

Catherine's full-length play Wharf At Woolloomooloo was co-commissioned by Playworks and SGLMG. In 2004 her screenplay adaptation was shortlisted for the IF Awards, Best Unproduced Screenplay. Other credits include Moonfleet, a stage adaptation of John Meade Falkner's classic novel, commissioned and produced Windmill National Children's Theatre and Mainstreet Theatre Company. A World Into A Child, A Child Into The World was produced by ABC Radio. A Day Too Great, a full-length play, adapted for ABC Radio in a three-part series. Left Breathless A Question, a short play, premiered at the Griffin Theatre Company in 2007 as part of the 7-ON writer's group Needs Project.

FAMILY RUNNING FOR MR WHIPPY

Family Running For Mr Whippy is a reverie into the outer suburbs in one woman's inner world.

It is a world which is haunting and hilarious, where imagination and memory intermingle ominously, where the narrator struggles to find her way through it, to go above it, to find a way, out, and to see...

It is an experimental work, approximately 20 minutes long.

2 males

2 females

chorus - mixed

CLARK IN SARAJEVO

Clark In Sarajevo traces the journey of Clark Cant, a mild-mannered reporter, who in an effort to cast off his ordinariness reinvents himself as a war correspondent in Sarajevo. It is a play about the gaze of the West as it follows Clark's fall from a flat disengaged spectator/voyeur of the siege, to a man who comes to embody the complex emotions of an uncomprehending witness to a catastrophe.

2 acts (approx 80 minutes)

1 male central character/other characters multi

6 - 8 cast (variable, equal male/female division. Has been performed with 2 males, 4 females, with some doubling)

THE WHARF AT WOOLOOMOOLOO

It is 1946 and Peggy is an expressionist artist in a Sydney that doesn't yet understand. But it matters not for on one fateful night she meets the young, rich and powerful art patrons, the Huxleys. She swoons, she falters, she falls in love but does love really look like this?

2 acts

8 males

6 females

A DAY TOO GREAT

Joss is 22 years old, she's tried and failed to kill herself but is determined in her own chaotic way to try again.

A Day Too Great charts the night of her suicide watch. In her flat, her boyfriend and best friend are with her - watching, waiting, increasingly terrified and exhausted.

Through the night the pain yelps out of Joss - she has the impulse to cut and crush those dearest to her, to cast out every demon thought, to wrestle with her murderous god as she tests the limits of love, spinning those in her orbit on a darkening trajectory...

A Day Too Great is a searing portrait of psychic pain. It examines the fragile bonds that hold us all in place, blowing away the comforting aphorisms and asks the question what part of the self needs to be killed in order to live?

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