Sue Rider Receives Lifetime Achievement Award

It might have been wet and cold outside, but inside the warmth in the room was palpable when former QPAC CEO Dr Tony Gould presented Sue Rider with the Alan Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award in front of an audience of industry colleagues on Monday June 27, 2016.Rider was a popular and worthy recipient having spent a lifetime working in the theatre, 30 years of it in Brisbane.

The award, given annually since 2002 by the Queensland Actors’ & Entertainers’ Benevolent Fund, takes its name from Alan Edwards who was Queensland Theatre Company’s first Artistic Director, a position he held for eighteen years. Rider, a Brisbane-based director, writer, dramaturg, producer and mentor, was born in the UK and had her beginnings in the industry in youth theatre in England. She came to Australia via Nigeria in 1975. Establishing herself in Adelaide, she worked with the Stage Company, Patch Theatre, Elder Conservatorium, SA Film Corporation, ABC, Black Women in Focus and founded the Acting Company of South Australia.

Moving to Brisbane in 1986, she has been based there ever since, working with QTC, La Boite, USQ, Metro Arts, Queensland Conservatorium Music Theatre Course, and various other independent companies. In New Zealand she has worked with Court Theatre Christchurch, Circa Theatre Wellington, and Wellington Summer Shakespeare.

From 1993 until 2000 Rider was Artistic Director of La Boite Theatre, where she was responsible for leading the company to full professional status with a focus on development of local theatre professionals culminating in a program which included fifteen world premieres and nineteen Queensland premieres.

Rider has been the recipient of a Matilda Award for her “strong and visionary creative steering of La Boite,” a Perform/4MBS Award in 1999 and the 1999 Playlab Award. Her directing credits include award-winning productions of Cosi Fan tutte, Vincent in Brixton, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Meeting Karpovsky, plus several plays for indigenous theatre, Have You Ever Heard a Wombat Sing?, Stradbroke Dreamtime, You Came to my Country and you didn’t turn Black, and Blackrock.

Rider’s most high-profile play, which she wrote and directed, was The Matilda Women, which premiered at La Boite in 1993. Other writing credits include; Federation Ragtime, Gloria’s Handbag, Playing Miss Haversham, Sarah’s Heavy Heart, Freedom Ride, Bumpy Angels, four youth opera libretti including Sid the Serpent who wanted to sing and The Silence Tree.

Past recipients of the Alan Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award have included Carol Burns, Errol O’Neill, Kaye Stevenson, Penny Everingham, and Rider’s husband, Jim Vile who received the award in 2014.

Peter Pinne

Image: Sue Rider and Tony Gould.