FIRE

(3M, 8W)

The author of over twenty plays, playwright and farmer Millicent Sylvia Armstrong (1888-1973) was a recipient of the Croix de Guerre for her bravery as an orderly at the hospital on the Front Line while serving at the Abbaye de Royaumont, Asnières-sur-Oise, France during World War One.

Returning home she acquired a property, Clear Hills, under the Returned Soldiers Settlers Scheme at Gunning, in the Southern Tablelands of NSW.

While she wrote plays and pantomime to entertain the soldiers during their confinement in France, her first full length work FIRE was awarded joint third prize in the Sydney Daily Telegraph play competition in 1923 (and published by them in serial form). With its cast of eight roles (out of eleven) for women and set on a remote station in the west of the state, it provides a wonderfully dramatic opportunity to explore themes of post-War suffragism, moral perfidy and toxic masculinity. 

Millicent’s short gothic drama  AT DUSK (1934) has become her most performed work, published by  William and T. Inglis Moore in Best Australian One-Act Plays by Angus & Robertson in 1937.

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