KIRSTY Budding will head to England later this year to begin a two-year Master of Studies in Writing for Performance at Cambridge University.
While there, her supervisor will be British playwright Fraser Grace, whose plays include “Breakfast with Mugabe” and “Always Orange” for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
The program, which starts in October, is taught in the form of intensive residencies at Cambridge University and distance supervision periods, allowing Budding to continue living in Canberra most of the time and to manage her business, Budding Entertainment.
No stranger to these pages, a quick glimpse back shows that in 2019 she was announced as “YMag Woman of the Year” by Australian women’s empowerment magazine “YMag”, and also honoured with their “Rising Star Award.”
In 2016 she won Best Script Award for her play “Brexit” in Short+Sweet Theatre, then at the end of the same year staged “Santa, Baby”, short Christmas plays written by Canberra playwrights and in 2015, her full-length play “The Art of Teaching Nothing” was staged.
Business-wise, she extended her aptly-named Budding Theatre to include a new talent agency providing professional opportunities for children and teens.
But Budding is no “theatre-only” tragic. In the lockdown period she launched a “Theatre & Wine Appreciation” course for adults, but she also holds a masters from the ANU in Arab and Islamic studies.
Scarcely daunted by the pandemic, in 2021 she completed, online, the professional program in producing with UCLA and the industry certificate in script assessment at the Australian Film Television and Radio School.
She travelled to the US where her screenwriting won top prizes in the Dallas International Film Festival Screenwriting Competition, Sherman Oaks Film Festival and Hollywood Just4Shorts.
Last year was a bumper one, when her sci-fi comedy won the Houston Comedy Film Festival short comedy section, she was named a 2022 Screenwriter to Watch by Event Horizon Films, saw her screenplay for a feature set during the Australian bushfires selected for “Scriptable” by Queensland Writers Centre and was inducted into the Australian Writers’ Guild Pathways Showcase.
Born into a Gloucestershire family in England as the oldest of four children, Budding spent her childhood going to and from Australia, with short stints in Perth and Adelaide when little. But her formative years were in the UK, accounting for her crisp English accent, though she finished up at school in Perth from age 15 to 17.
While her parents continued to prevaricate over geography, Budding headed straight for the ANU and, after graduating with an arts degree and a teaching diploma, she became a working teacher around Canberra.
On weekends and nights, she was already teaching theatre, until someone suggested to her that there was an opening in the market for children’s acting classes, so she started hosting holiday programs on a regular basis.
All the while, she was involved in the 10-minute play movement, Short+Sweet, of which she says: “They provided a stage for a forum and when I first saw my own script on stage in Sydney, I thought, ‘I like this’.”
Being a self-described “old-school Anglican person,” she started adapting classic novels for the stage, mainly Jane Austen, whom she loves, but also Dickens, Louisa Alcott and Scott Fitzgerald.
“I realised that if you produce lesser-known works, people won’t come, but this way I wouldn’t lose money on the shows,” she says, noting with some amusement that when she put “Little Women” on in The Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre staff were shocked by how well it went.
By 2015, her sideline teaching was becoming a real source of income, but it took until 2019 for her to stop teaching, just in time for covid to hit.
Nothing daunted, Budding took to Zoom and challenged her pupils to “stay engaged” by producing little videos.
“Of course, it wasn’t as satisfying as having everyone in the room, but it served a function,” Budding says.
With covid recovery pretty much behind her, Budding decided she wanted to do more stage postgraduate studies and Googled around.
“I wanted to do something involving writing for performance, but I also wanted to head back to the UK to see more of my grandma,” she said.
“I looked at different courses, but this one stood out. It involves four intensive study blocks where I travel backwards and there, but I’m still able to run my business in Canberra.
“In between residencies, they’ll set assignments and give feedback – I’m very happy to work on my own.”
Covid, she believes, has made everybody comfortable with the idea that you can achieve things from your own bedroom, so that distance studies are no longer considered second-rate education.
She doesn’t know the Cambridge area, but says that while growing up, the “Cambridge thing” got in her head, notably the Cambridge Footlights – think Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry and Rowan Atkinson.
The Cambridge University course will include scriptwriting for both live theatre and screen, and a section for stand-up comedy with a Cambridge Footlights team as part of the course.
“I’m all about comedy, I just want to laugh after the few years we’ve had,” she says.
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