Kate Mulvany - Jasper Jones: Based on the novel by Craig Silvey 

Kate Mulvany is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter. Her new play, The Rasputin Affair, was shortlisted for the Griffin New Play Award and the Patrick White Award and will premiere at Ensemble Theatre in 2017. In 2015, she penned Masquerade, a reimagining of the much-loved childrens book by Kit Williams, which was performed at the 2015 Sydney Festival, the State Theatre Company of South Australia and the Melbourne Festival. Her autobiographical play, The Seed, commissioned by Belvoir, won the Sydney Theatre Award for Best Independent Production in 2007 and is currently being developed into a feature film. Kates Medea, created with Anne-Louise Sarks and produced by Belvoir in 2012, won a number of awards including an AWGIE and five Sydney Theatre Awards. It completed hugely successful seasons at Londons Gate Theatre and Aucklands Silo Theatre.

Shes also currently under commission at Sydney Theatre Company. Kates other plays and musicals include The Danger Age (Deckchair Theatre/La Boite); Blood and Bone (The Stables/Naked Theatre Company); The Web (Hothouse/Black Swan State Theatre Company); Somewhere (co-written with Tim Minchin for the Joan Sutherland PAC); and Storytime (Old Fitzroy Theatre), which won Kate the 2004 Philip Parsons Award. Kate is also an award-winning stage and screen actor, whose credits include The Seed, Buried Child (Belvoir); Blasted (B Sharp/ Sheedy Productions); Tartuffe, Macbeth, Julius Caesar (Bell Shakespeare); The Crucible, Proof, A Man With Five Children, King Lear, Rabbit (Sydney Theatre Company); The Beast (Melbourne Theatre Company); The Literati, Mr Baileys Minder (Griffin Theatre Company); and the feature films The Little Death and The Great Gatsby. Craig Silvey grew up on an orchard in Dwellingup, Western Australia. He now lives in Fremantle, Western Australia, where, at the age of nineteen, he wrote his first novel, Rhubarb, published by Fremantle Press in 2004. In 2007, Craig released The World According to Warren, a picture book affectionately starring the guide dog from Rhubarb.

In early 2008, he completed his second novel, the award-winning Jasper Jones, which has become a hit around the globeit has been published in over thirty countries and has been translated into fourteen languages. Jasper Jones has won Australian Book Industry awards, Australian Independent Booksellers awards, the Australian Booksellers Choice Award and was a co-winner of the West Australian Premiers Award for Fiction. The novel also won the 2012 USA Printz Honor Book for excellence in literature written for young adults. Jasper Jones has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and both the Victorian and NSW Premiers Literary Awards, among others. In 2016, Craig co-wrote the AWGIE-winning adaptation of the Jasper Jones feature film. Craig followed up Jasper Jones with the acclaimed and beautifully illustrated novella, The Amber Amulet.

Outside of literature, Craig is the singer-songwriter for the band The Nancy Sikes.

INTRODUCTION 1965 will be a tumultuous year for the small town of Corrigan. The race to the moon is underway. Australias involvement in the war in Vietnam is being escalated and some of the young men are being conscripted and sent over to fight in it. And fifteen-year-old Laura Wishart has mysteriously disappeared. For Corrigan the last event overshadows the others.

What happened to her? For Charlie Bucktin this summer will be traumatic and life-changing. This play, like Craig Silveys much-loved 2009 novel on which it is based, starts like a good detective story with the discovery of a body but it soon becomes something else. In the thrilling opening scene Charlie is woken in the night by Jasper Jones, the slightly older and much tougher outcast boy, and taken to his secret place outside town where he has found Lauras body hanging from a tree. For reasons that are shocking but completely understandable they cut her down, weigh her body with stones and sink her in the dam. It is from that initiating act that the play starts to depart from the detective genre. There are no detectives, only the police who, like the townsfolk, mindlessly blame Jasper for everything bad that happens in Corrigan, and when it comes to the crunch are happy to violently beat him up because he is a half-caste.

Only Charlie and Jasper know what has happened to Lauras body, and they keep their secret till the end, hoping to find out the how and the why of it all. This is a play about trust and courage, especially among the five wonderful central teenage characters. Jasper believes he can trust Charlie, which is why he seeks his help in the first place. Charlie finds to his surprise that he almost instantly trusts Jasper, in spite of Jaspers bad reputation and his own doubts: CHARLIE : I cant trust anythingliquor, cigarettes. God knows whatll happen when I have sex. () Charlie also has a close friend, the comically courageous cricket-tragic Jeffrey Lu, the son of refugees from Vietnam. (One of the other major events of 1965 was Doug Walters test debut, about which Jeffrey is obsessed.) Their friendship is expressed in a series of cheerfully insulting interchanges that provide much of the plays humour. (One of the other major events of 1965 was Doug Walters test debut, about which Jeffrey is obsessed.) Their friendship is expressed in a series of cheerfully insulting interchanges that provide much of the plays humour.

One of these is their argument about superheroes, when Charlie is arguing that the mortal Batman obviously has more courage than the invulnerable Superman (). Soon after that they meet Lauras sister Eliza, whom Charlie has a crush on but dare not approach; and then the town bully, Warwick, whose size, strength and attendant goons make it easy to be tough. We admire Jeffreys clownish bravery, as he faces up to these thugs who are thwarting his attempts to get a place in the cricket team. For all Charlies pathological fear of insects and his general book-nerd gentleness, we admire his courage as he sticks by Jasper. But in the end we discover that it is Laura who has had to endure the most. Jeffrey teases Charlie about his infatuation with Eliza (Sassytime!).

Charlie and Elizas relationship is a beautifully written first-love story, full of awkwardness, misunderstanding and growing tenderness. It is the awkwardness and misunderstanding that obscures another issue of trust, when we finally learn the truth of what they have been inadvertently keeping from each other. The fifth teenager is of course the dead Laura. In the novel Charlie is haunted by memories and stories of her. In a play he can be haunted by her ghost. It is one of the many brilliant things about Kate Mulvanys adaptation that she brings Laura on stage in the flesh.