Margaret Davis Director, Playwright, Teaching Artist
Margaret has had a long career in the performing arts, principally as a director and playwright but also as an actor, dancer, choreographer and lecturer.
She was the first woman appointed as a director with an Australian mainstage theatre company (1981 Assistant Director of the State Theatre Company of South Australia) and also built the Riverina Theatre Company to professional touring status in the mid-1980s.
She has directed more than 50 productions for leading theatres around Australia (including Griffin, Belvoir and Malthouse) and with her own company, Two Planks and a Passion. Her particular interest in physical theatre is reflected in her original works Isis Dreaming and Spilling Bodies and the gothic horror novel adaptation, The Monk. Other produced works as a playwright include Mad Before Midday and The Woman on the Twenty Dollar Note, for which she received an AWGIE nomination for best play for young audiences.
In May 2017 Margaret created and directed a production of a new work about food and memory, Breaking Bread, which featured a team of 16 writers and actors from the Blue Mountains area and had a sell-out season.
Margaret has staged a second new work, Eating Pomegranates, with a successful season at Wentworth Falls School of Arts in March 2019. The work, which celebrates bodies through all stages of life and death, was developed through a QLab residency at the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre and the support of the Blue Mountains Cultural Trust.
Since 2018 Margaret has been a resident artist with the Annual Youth Theatre Festival at the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, devising and directing physical theatre pieces with Year 11 students from Blue Mountains High Schools.
In 2019 she was the Guest Director on the Originate project at the Joan, working with a group of emerging theatre artists and an astronomer from Western Sydney University to produce Push Me Away Pull Me Closer as a response to the concept of black holes and gravitational forces both in space and in human relationships.
Margaret lectured in Contextual Studies for the BA in Performing Arts at AIM for ten years and also freelances as a dramaturge and script assessor (principally with the Australian Writers’ Guild.)
During the Covid 19 crisis Margaret wrote The Angel Code as part of Q Theatre’s Short Message Service and an autobiographical piece for Come to Where I Am – Australia: a joint initiative of Critical Stages (AUS) and Paines Plough (U.K.) and also began developing a third Blue Mountains work, Lookout/Look Out! with the assistance of a Rapid Response grant from Blue Mountains City of the Arts Trust and further funding from CreateNSW. Her play Sanctuary was a finalist for the Silver Gull Award in 2021.
In development: Lookout/Look Out! (collaboration as Writer/Director with Dharug Elder Chris Tobin, Performers Shane Porteous and Georgia Adamson, Dharug Visual artist/Storyteller Jessica Tobin, Video Artist Sean O'Keeffe and Dramaturg Danielle Maas.
In development: full length play script Did You Tell Anyone Where You Were Going?
Margaret also freelances as a Mentor, Script Assessor and Acting Coach.
