Angie Farrow is an Associate Professor at Massey University specialising in theatre and creative processes. She has been writing plays since she was a student and her career as a playwright was launched when she won the Sunday Times Student Playwriting Award for her play, The Blue One in the UK. Several playwriting awards and plays followed including a Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Festival in 1978 for her play, Privitus.
Angie has a special interest in community theatre and theatre for young adults. She has written numerous plays for three young peoples’ theatre companies; Bush Telegraph and Travelling Light in the UK and Calico Young People’s´Theatre in New Zealand. Several of her plays are featured in two anthologies, Plays for Physical Theatre (Thompson Learning/Dunmore Press, 2005) and Plays for Physical Theatre 11 (Dunmore Press, 2010).
Apart from theatre plays, Angie also writes for radio. Her first radio play, All Packed Up, was produced at the BBC. She wrote Carrion, which won a Mobil Award For Best Radio Drama in 1992. In 1993 her play New Zealand Lamb was a finalist in the radio suffrage competition and was subsequently broadcast on RNZ and the ABC. In the same year she co-wrote with Fiona Farrell Looking Forward, an exchange of letters between a woman who lived in 1893 and one who lived in 1993. Her two-part radio play The Beauty Businesswas produced in 1996 and was followed by Speed Of Light (1998) an adaptation from a theatre piece about teenage suicide and Despatch (2007), a play about a New Zealand war journalist adapted from her theatre play of the same name.
Angie has written three large-scale plays for big casts: Despatch (2007) Before The Birds(2009) and The River (2012). Despatch won the prestigious ‘The Pen is a Mighty Sword International Playwriting Competition’ run by The Virtual Theatre in the USA and Before the Birds won her Bruce Wrenn Award for Outstanding Contribution to NZ Playwriting’ as well as a Globe Theatre Award for ‘Best New New Zealand Play’.
In recent years, Angie has enjoyed writing short plays. They have performed in theatre festivals in several countries including India, Australia, New Zealand USA, UK, Canada and Singapore. The plays have won several awards and prizes including Best Drama Script at the Auckland Short and Sweet Festival (NZ: 2014) for Leo Rising, Winner of Inspirato Playwriting Award for The Blue One (Canada: 2013); Best Wild Card at the Sydney Short and Sweet Festival (Sydney:2014); People’s Choice Winner at the Inspirato Festival forTango Partner (Canada: 2011); (People’s Choice Award for Falling in Melbourne Short and Sweet Festival (Melbourne:2010); First Prize in The Three Leeches Playwriting Contest forLifetime (USA: 2013) Best Script for Lifetime at the Singapore Short and Sweet Festival (Singapore: 2010). Fourteen of Angie’s short plays are published in Falling and Other Short Plays (Steele Roberts 2014).
Her most recent full-length play, The Politician’s Wife, was produced at Centrepoint, Palmerston North and BATS, Wellington in 2016.
Playwrights Association of New Zealand (Inc) 