Ken Duncum has been writing for theatre and television for nearly 20 years, and is recognised as one of New Zealand´s leading playwrights. A recent all-time ´Top 30´ list of New Zealand plays (as voted by theatre professionals) featured three of Ken´s plays (Blue Sky Boys, Flipside and Horseplay), the highest tally of any playwright. Similarly, his work for television has won awards in New Zealand and been screened internationally.
His plays include a loose trilogy looking at the impact of music on New Zealand - from 50´s rock ´n roll vs Beatles-era British Invasion (Blue Sky Boys), 70´s Glam (John, I´m Only Dancing) and Punk (Waterloo Sunset). He has also written plays about men lost at sea (Flipside), Polish saints (The Temptations Of St. Max), unsolved murders (Trick Of The Light) and dark goings-on in smalltown New Zealand (Horseplay).
Cherish (published by VUP, 2004) won Best New New Zealand Play at the Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards in 2003 - making it two in a row for Ken as his play Trick Of The Light won the same award the previous year."
Ken has also written extensively for television drama series´ such as Duggan and Cover Story (for which he won Best Script For Drama at the NZ Film and Television Awards) as well as television comedy (receiving an award for Best Writer - Comedy at the 2002 TV Awards for Willy Nilly). In 2001 Ken was appointed Director of the MA Scriptwriting programme at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington - in which position he continues to foster emerging New Zealand scriptwriting talent.
Ken´s newest play, Picture Perfect, was produced in 2006 by Circa Theatre in his home city of Wellington, NZ.
Ken Duncum
Wellington 1964 and The Everly Brothers, at a low point professionally and personally, are about to perform in the half empty Buffalo Hall. Across town The Beatles are also performing, but to rapturous crowds. Tensions mount between brothers Phil and Don as two Beatles fans, Fran and Jillian, are unwittingly caught in the crossfire.
Cast: 6
Ken Duncum
A play about loss - about what we had or couldn't have.
Cast: 4
Ken Duncum
A dramatic recreation of the 119 days survival in the wrecked Rose Noelle. Four men are tested and changed by the experience of confronting the elements, each other and, most importantly, themselves.
Cast: 4
Ken Duncum
Phil and Nadine, terminally unemployable, are cursed by the birth of the new Messiah into their inadequate relationship and squalid bedsit.
Cast: 4
Ken Duncum
New Zealand literary icons James K. Baxter and Ronald Hugh Morrison are forced to spend the night together with a dead horse.
PUBLISHED by Victoria University Press & The Play Press IN THE ANTHOLOGY PLAYS 1: SMALL TOWNS & SEA
Cast: 4
Ken Duncum
Rose and Lily are Siamese Twins pressured into being the faces for a new perfume called "Jism". Unfortunately, a key ingredient of the perfume makes it less than flavour of the month for their anti-vivisectionist flatmate.
Cast: 9
Ken Duncum
Glam gatecrashes an early seventies boys' high as a subversive music teacher turns macho school culture on its head via a staging of David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust.
Cast: 8
Ken Duncum
Frankie, assailed by fear and panics in the dark hour before dawn, tells her history, sings songs and fleshes out her nightmare and fantasies.
Cast: 1
Ken Duncum
Jenny and Alex have lost a son, and when a futuristic entertainment system provides solace and comfort, Jenny becomes obsessed. She has found salvation but the technology begins to malfunction and the family does too. An intriguing and amusing analysis of the impact of virtual reality on family life and the nature of reality itself.
What are the unforeseen and ironic consequences if our most heartfelt prayers are actually answered?
Cast: 5
Ken Duncum
Each of these three plays takes as its kernel a news story from the past that captured the imagination of New Zealanders. In Horseplay novelist Ronald Hugh Morrieson and poet James K. Baxter meet and share the stage with the rear end of a horse, while in Flipside four sailors confront the elements for 119 days, adrift on the overturned boat Rose-Noelle.
Cast:
Ken Duncum
This book brings together Ken Duncum's three plays about the intersection of popular overseas music culture with New Zealand society, each of them showing a slice of Kiwi kids seeking an identity and a relationship to the world through different ways of dressing, talking, posing and thinking delivered to them through imported music.
Cast:
Ken Duncum
As multifarious horrors pour at perfectionist Pam from the TV, newspapers and her own experience, Pam struggles to deal with them through humour, cynicism or a variety of masks.
Cast: 1
Ken Duncum
Damien Wilkins
Exercises give your body a workout. These exercises do the same for your imagination!
Cast:
Ken Duncum
Commissioned by Court Theatre with a successful premiere during the Christchurch Festival, Ken Duncum smartly and sympathetically translates from page to stage F Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel The Great Gatsby.
Cast: 8
Ken Duncum
A riotous interpretation of the story of Father Maximilian Kolbe who volunteered his life to save another in Auschwitz
Cast: 6
Ken Duncum
Two linked plays. The same motel three decades apart.
Two generations, and the long shadow of a famous murder case.
A brother and a sister bring their mother's ashes to the motel. It was her dying wish. But why? Is there a key here to past secrets? How is the mystery of that past mirrored in their own lives and relationships?
Cast: 3
Ken Duncum
The Brits Club - a converted Wellington boathouse where ex-pat Poms and Kiwi punks collide on the night of the 1980 FA Cup Final. Childless couple Terry and Julie find themselves faced with the same burning question as Stormboy, Oik and Cat - if there's No Future, how do you grow up?
Cast: 6