Penalty Shot

By Daynan Brazil

Football is a religion to Rudi and his mates - who are all back in Sydney. Lee hates football, he hates sport full stop. He’d rather be jamming with his punk band in Brisbane. But at a new school – in a new town – what can you do? Mr Rock is stuck with Mr Jock. Before long, Rudi is sharing Lee’s passion for punk, and Lee is spending as much time on the soccer pitch as he once did strumming his guitar. When the two pay Rudi’s friends a visit, Lee sees that football can be more than the world game – it can be tribal too.

Daynan Brazil's Penalty Shot is a play for teenage audiences. It's about misplaced passion, friendship and the thin line between.

First presented by Canberra's Jigsaw Theatre Company the play has toured NSW and Victoria and was nominated for an Australian Writers’ Guild award (AWGIE) in 2008.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lucy & Ruth
• Release date: Jan 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301655434

Daynan Brazil

Daynan’s plays include Sun Kisses, which was produced by Railway Street Theatre and toured regional New South Wales; The Surgical Table, which received the inaugural Queensland Theatre Company/Courier-Mail George Landen Dann Award; and Three Blokes and their Barbies which has successfully toured rural and regional Queensland and Western Australia. Daynan was nominated for an Australian Writers’ Guild award (AWGIE) in 2008 for theatre for young people for Penalty Shot, which has toured the ACT, Victoria and regional NSW.

Book preview

PENALTY SHOT

By Daynan Brazil

Copyright 2013 Daynan Brazil

Smashwords Edition

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Any performance or public reading of the play in this ebook is forbidden unless a license has been received from the author's agent. The purchase of this ebook in no way gives the purchaser the right to perform the play in public, whether by means of a staged production or as a reading. Inquiries concerning performance, translation or recording rights should be made to Lucy & Ruth Publishing.

Penalty Shot was commissioned by Kate Shearer for Jigsaw Theatre Company in 2006. Jigsaw Theatre Company is supported by the ACT Government through arts ACT and the Department of Education and Training.

Cover design and photography: Benjamin Bray

Table of Contents

Introduction

Writer's notes

Penalty Shot

First production details

About the author

Introduction

The concept for Penalty Shot began when I first got back from living in London. It was 2002 and the World Cup was on. I knew that football was huge in the UK but wasn’t expecting (in an AFL town like Melbourne) for it to be the most popular game played in schools. Every lunch hour it is played with force, speed and passion – deep, real passion. Watching it one day, I felt my heart race and I thought: how can I capture this on stage?

An event that year triggered an idea for a play (which at the time I thought I was going to create in the UK but when I was appointed to Jigsaw I commissioned Daynan Brazil to write it for us). When Italy lost to Korea in the 2002 World Cup, it was reported that a group of boys set a car ablaze, smashed windows of an Italian restaurant in Carlton and attacked police with water bombs. How could a game in Korea lead to vandalism in Australia? In the following year, a parent was banned from an under-7s AFL game (yes, little wee under 7s) for throwing a can at a referee’s head and screaming obscenities.

I began pondering: how does love for a team (which is such a positive thing) turn to violence? What are the backgrounds, choices and consequences for young men and, more broadly, our community at large when this happens? In a penalty shoot out - it doesn’t matter how well you play the game, it can all be lost in just a moment and that seemed a powerful metaphor for any risk taking