Meredith Oakes

Meredith Oakes (born 18 Sept 1946,) is an Australian playwright who has lived in London since 1970. She has written plays, adaptations, translations, opera texts and poems, and taught play-writing at Royal Holloway College and for the Arvon Foundation. She also wrote music criticism before leaving Australia for The Daily Telegraph in Sydney, and from 1988 to 1991 for The Independent, as well as contributing to a variety of magazines including The Listener.

Oakes is a seventh-generation Australian who was educated at Cheltenham Girls High School, Sydney from 1959 to 1963, and then at the University of Sydney where she took double honours in French and Music. She studied violin with Gordon Bennett of the Sydney String Quartet and piano as a second instrument. In London, she initially worked for the magazine Music and Musicians as an editorial assistant and writer, and later was public relations officer for Allied Artists Agency from 1972 to 1973 when they were presenting the London Music Digest, a series of contemporary concerts at the Round House.

She is married to the opera critic Tom Sutcliffe. Their son, Walter Sutcliffe, is a theatre and opera director.

Her first performed play was The Neighbour for the Royal National Theatre in 1993. Other plays have included The Editing Process (1994), Faith (1997), and Scenes from the Back of Beyond (2006) at the Royal Court Theatre, Mind the Gap (1995) at Hampstead Theatre, Man for Hire (2002) at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, and Shadowmouth (2006) at the Crucible Studio in Sheffield. Her most recent plays were a trio of shorts, The Fisherman, Short Lease and SATB, written for actor-musician students at Rose Bruford College and staged at Battersea Arts Centre in June 2007. A volume of Collected Plays was published by Oberon Books in 2010, containing two radio plays Glide and The Mind of the Meeting, and five stage plays The Neighbour, The Editing Process, Faith, Her Mother and Bartok, and Shadowmouth.

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