Paul Bishop and Colin Moody in the Frail Man
The
Frail
Man
Winner of the 2002 Wal Cherry Play of the Year Award / 2004 Malcolm Robertson Prize / 2005 New Dramatists Sumner Locke Elliot Exchange Award / Shortlisted for the 2004 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
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The Frail Man tells the story of Steven Saken, a wunderkind businessman who wakes one day to find his body ravaged by a mysterious cancer. In the midst of a billion dollar take-over bid Saken also finds himself at the centre of a murder investigation when a young muslim woman is brutally beaten to death outside his Toorak mansion. While the indefatigable Saken struggles with this perfect storm of events, the present is haunted by the colonial past. Two convict ghosts attempt to escape imprisonment and survive a new country that holds only terror and the unknown.
The Frail Man won both the 2002 Wal Cherry Play of the Year Award, the Malcolm Robertson Prize and the PWA/New Dramatists Exchange Award. It was first produced by The Playbox Theatre Company in 2004 and subsequently produced at the Darlinghurst Theatre in Sydney.
“It’s the ambition of Anthony Crowley’s The Frail Man that is most exhilarating. It tells three stories that range over two centuries, is fuelled by moral outrage, gives a politically inflected view of contemporary Australia, yet has a universality and scale of reference that makes it epic in its range.”
