See below, or see it on the RANDOM 8 website by clicking here.

THE RIVER THAT RAN OUT is a one-act play for children with a cast of 3—either 3 x female performers, or 2 x female and 1 x male. It was Highly Commended in the 2010 Trinity Guildhall International Playwriting Competition (in the category for audiences of 11 years old and under). Find it in: Prize-winning Plays from the International Playwriting Competition 2010, published by Orient Blackswan and Trinity College London.

Meanwhile, here’s the synopsis: Fed up with being neglected and treated like a garbage dump, The River takes off in search of greener pastures.

Once upon a tiger will be published in an anthology due out the beginning of 2012. In the meantime, you can read it here.

‘Benjamin’, probably the last thylacine, at Hobart Zoo circa 1936

It was short-listed for the Rodney Seaborn Playwrights Award 2011.

RANDOM 8 is original, accomplished film-making for thinking grown-ups. Sure, I’m biased: I was script dramaturg and co-producer on RANDOM 8. But look around you, at the popular uprisings in various Arab countries, at the Occupy protests around the globe, at the artists’ groups and collectives springing up in response to a reduced (and often) conservative cultural climate—RANDOM 8 is a film for now.

Find out why at www.random8thefilm.com

Synopsis
A woman travels through North Korea. Here nothing is as it seems, everyone has their secrets: strangers are polite, but each hides their true feelings. In the late nineteenth century Korea acquired the nickname ‘Hermit Kingdom’ after it closed its doors to the world. These days, while the South is a modern democracy and one of Asia’s tiger economies, in the North the terms ‘Hermit’ and ‘Kingdom’ apply in bizarre and novel ways. What other country kidnaps foreign film-makers?  Regards all overseas tourists as potential spies and saboteurs? And what other nation has installed a dead person as their head of state? Pyongyang Affair mixes fact and fiction to provide a rare insight into this last bastion of hardline communism; the singular and surreal place that is North Korea and now has the dubious distinction of being part of an ‘axis of evil’.

Excerpt 1:

NARRATOR
I’ve expressed an interest in history, so today I’m taken, for another extra charge of course, to The Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum. Ironically, for a system that berates capitalism at every turn, it never passes up the opportunity to make a fast buck.

Someone walks briskly along a corridor. The approaching footsteps stop.



THE GHOSTWRITER
A brown-jacketed cadre turns up to give her some on the spot guidance.

NARRATOR
Like everywhere else it’s a tightly choreographed act. They recite the spiel, chant the statistics, repeat the tales of revolutionary valour. To accord with the prevailing mythology, Kim Jong-il, who was, by most accounts, born in the Siberian town of Khabarovsk, has here been reborn in a log cabin on the slopes of Mount Paekdu. While his parents single-handedly orchestrated the defeat of the Japanese.

The sounds of the museum: echoing passageways and snippets of audio displays.



NARRATOR
The moment of his birth, the curator insists, was heralded by a plethora of meteorological omens and the appearance of a dazzling new comet with a fiery tail. Yeah right, and Bambi was outside frolicking in the snow. I look quizzically at Mr Mok. Does he really believe all this fairytale drivel? Instead I ask: do many people visit this museum?

GUIDE 2
Several thousand every day.

NARRATOR
Yet strangely none of them are here when I take my tour.

Wind.
And the distant sounds of a mass rally or celebration.



NARRATOR
North Korea’s institutions celebrate the past in technicolour and spectacle, while the roadside rhetoric promises a magnificent future. These seem the latitudes where my hosts feel most comfortable. Back then and yet to come. Anywhere but now.

Excerpt 2:

NARRATOR 
(Speaking over the Guide’s list.)
During my last stay in Seoul, I acquired a US government handbook about North Korea, written for Marine Corps Intelligence. At the back is a vocabulary section. So now, in addition to the usual beginner’s phrases:

KOREAN SPEAKER
안녕하세요

NARRATOR
Hello.

KOREAN SPEAKER
처음 뵙겠어요

NARRATOR
How are you?

KOREAN SPEAKER
성함이 어떻게되세요? (What’s your name?)

NARRATOR
I can add such useful commands as:

KOREAN SPEAKER
무기 냬려놔!

NARRATOR
Drop your weapons

KOREAN SPEAKER
자네는 포로이야

NARRATOR
You are a prisoner, and perhaps most helpful of all

KOREAN SPEAKER
라캤 발사기 어디 있어요?

NARRATOR
Where are the rocket launchers?

Music: ‘Song for TKJD’ from the CD ‘Epigraphs.’



THE GHOSTWRITER
Walls have ears. Surveillance is ubiquitous. So she conceals her note-taking and carries her daypack with her even to the bathroom. And if this is starting to sound rather too much like something dreamed up by Ian Fleming or George Orwell, just remember that paranoia is an integral part of the North Korean experience.

GUIDE 2
Your daughter is how old?

NARRATOR
18.

GUIDE 2
You said before she is 16.

NARRATOR
Did I?

GUIDE 2
Yes.

NARRATOR
I made a mistake. My elder daughter is 18; the younger 16.

GUIDE 2
You have 2 daughters?

NARRATOR
Yes.

GUIDE 2
You told me before you have one.

NARRATOR
I’ve forgotten

THE GHOSTWRITER
the 2 fundamental rules of being interrogated: never volunteer extraneous detail, and never tell a lie unless you’re able to stick it out to the bitter end.

© Noëlle Janaczewska

You can listen and/or read the excerpt here.

Not yellow melancholy, but another melancholy thistle (Cirsium heterophyllum)

At The Old 505 Theatre, 342 Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills
(A short walk from Central Station)

GOOD WITH MAPS
Written and presented by Noëlle Janaczewska
Dramaturgy and direction by Kathryn Millard

When the world map was full of gaps, the Amazon topped the list of places unknown to western explorers. In 2011 are there any ‘unknowns’ left? On a trip to the Amazon, the writer ponders this and other questions as she struggles to deal with her father’s journey through Parkinson’s disease towards what is perhaps our last great unknown. If that makes GOOD WITH MAPS sound grim, it’s not. Yes, it’s sad and confronting in parts, but it’s also funny and thoughtful and celebrates the power of reading and literature to transport us to places both real and imagined.

GOOD WITH MAPS was researched and written with a New Work grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council.

While globe artichokes are fairly easy to buy, cardoons are not. In fact the only time I can remember seeing them for sale was years ago in France, when I thought they were some kind of weird celery.

So this Saturday I went to the Growers’ Market hoping to see those cardoons … I was out of luck. Plenty of beautiful artichokes though.

Artichokes at the Pyrmont Growers’ Market, 1 October 2011

And a drama, THE STEPPING STARS OF BÓRONKOWICE, was nominated in the Radio: Adaptation category. (It is adapted from my stage play of the same name.) THE STEPPING STARS OF BÓRONKOWICE was  broadcast on ABC Radio National’s Airplay program in October 2010.