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Chris Ballance

The Reluctant Dragon

chrisballance.wordpress.com
chrisballance@phonecoop.coop
Moffat, Dumfries and Galloway
Scotland

Editors' note: Chris Ballance, as a Green Party politician, was Member of the Scottish Parliament for the South of Scotland Region from 2003 - 2007. He was Manager of Moffat CAN from 2009 - 2013. He received an Edinburgh Festival Fringe First Award in 1989 for his play Water of Life .

Vision
Award-winning playwright, with experience of work with community groups, devising work with companies, providing commissioned scripts and performance for schools, especially age 7-12.
Chris has been an active member of the Scottish Green Party for over 25 years. Before his election to the Scottish Parliament he was manager of Survivors' Poetry Scotland, an arts and mental health charity in Glasgow, and a partner in a secondhand bookshop, Byre Books in Wigtown, Scotland, a shop which specialises in in books on theatre, film and film/mythology.
His main environmental interests are in the areas of land rights, energy and trade. He spent several years active in the campaign against nuclear power.

Productions and Projects

Hope Deferred

1997

A play about third world politics and world trade, set in a mythical developing world country. A comedy (by and large).
Produced first by the Machine Room, London.

A Scottish Reservation

1993

A devised piece with the company Fablevision, based on the experiences of Scots cleared from the Highlands to lands in Canada traditionally claimed by the Metis peoples. How the emigrants fought, and then settled with the Indians.

Sweet Fancy

1992 - 1995

A compilation of interesting and enjoyable writings about food, the piece has played in theatres and community halls, touring the UK, but was first designed as an entr’acte to entertain between the courses of a meal. It played at two Glasgow restaurants.

Water of Life

1989 - 1990

Edinburgh Festival Fringe First Award 1989
The story of Scotland’s most prolific mass murderers - Burke and Hare.
Seeing the anatomist’s demand for fresh corpses, and the difficulties experienced by the grave-diggers, Burke and Hare missed out the middlemen, by murdering their own supply of corpses.
This example of entrepreneurial capitalism, seemed to me to be just the sort of activity to fit in with Thatcherite philosophy, so that belief informed my play. The more they murdered, the more whisky they could afford, but the more they needed it to anaesthetise the pain of the crimes they were committing.
I was fascinated by the fact that they used whisky to anaesthetise their victims in order to murder them - and then themselves in order to anaesthetise their guilt.
touring, produced by Strathclyde Theatre Group and by Theatremachine

More About

Awards
Edinburgh Festival Fringe First (Scotsman Newspaper) 1989. Shortlisted for Verity Bargate Award, 1997 and runner-up in the South London Playwriting competition.

Other productions on related themes include:
Viva la Diva 1997
performed at the Pleasance Theatre, Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2002
Play reading, Los Angeles 2004
Runner-up for the South London Playwriting Competition, and shortlisted for the London-based Verity Bargate Award.
A celebration of Florence Foster Jenkins, the famous New York society lady who wanted so much to be an opera diva - regardless of her total lack of talent - that she booked the Carnegie Hall, and filled it. Her fans flocked to laugh at her, but she died happy. A comedy. Live adventurously, and live your dreams.

Bread and Water 1997
short play produced by Soho Theatre, London.
Two-hander about a lady wanting to give to the homeless on a soup kitchen - and finding herself being given to.

Safar, So Far 1995
Fablevision
A devised piece with a company of 6 actors, for a tour of secondary schools and community centres about the different generations of an Indian family, coming to terms with life in Glasgow - the journey from India to Glasgow.

The Reluctant Dragon 1995 - 97
State Youth Theatre of Lithuania, and previously, Stepping Stones Theatre, Edinburgh
a dramatisation of Kenneth Grahame’s short story about a dragon who doesn’t want to fight St George - this dragon is a poet and pacifist. A comedy for children aged 6-11.

Sir Gibbie 1994
Scottish Arts Council commission for Perth Theatre (unperformed).
An adaptation of the novel of the same name by Victorian Scots mythical realist writer, George MacDonald. A retelling of the Christian story, with a naked and dumb boy being crucified by a Scots landowner, and then finding his true inheritance with an early earth mother of the hills. A cry for compassion, love and spirituality, against the material world.
The first production of this was thwarted by a change of director at the commissioning theatre.

Commissioned writer with BBC Radio Scotland comedy programme Daily Sketch 1989 - 90

photo: The State Youth Theatre Lithuania's production of The Reluctant Dragon

Chris Ballance
chrisballance.wordpress.com
chrisballance@phonecoop.coop

9 Beechgrove
Moffat, Dumfries and Galloway
DG10 9RS
Scotland

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