Born July 16, 1951 ( 1951-07-16 ) Occupation Theatre director, Playwright | ||
Tony Moore (born Anthony William Moore, July 16, 1951) is a British-Australian theatre director and playwright based in Adelaide.
A "veteran" of the Adelaide theatre community, has been involved in theatre since he was eighteen years old and writing plays since 1988.
Moore is the co-founder, with his partner Joanna Webb, of publisher and performance rights agency Moore Books SA.
Life and career
Born in England, Tony Moore emigrated to Australia with his family when he was about ten years old, and identifies as Australian. In his youth he was a "very political animal," involved in the Vietnam Moratorium campaign, and was involved in the theatre from a young age.
Moore's father was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's disease in the 1970s, an experience which later inspired the play Tom. He became involved in directing in the 1970s, first through the Elizabeth Repertory Company and then through Salisbury Theatre Company, of which he was founding chairman, after which he moved on to the struggling La Mama Theatre in Hindmarsh. From 1988-1991 he attended the University of Adelaide, completing a degree in educational theatre.
In 1993, Moore left for the United Kingdom, where he worked as Production Manager at the Stag Theatre in Sevenoaks, Kent for eight years, eventually returning to Australia in 2005.
The first play Moore wrote was Murder at Doom Manor, which premiered in 1988, although he would not write in earnest until his move to England. Since then, he was written several plays and short pieces, which have been published in England and Australia, and some of his work has been translated into Greek. He co-founded Moore Books SA when he realised how few opportunities there were in Australia to become a published playwright.
For the 2006 Adelaide Fringe Festival, Moore wrote and directed Coping, a production of two one-act plays consisting of "Tom," about the impact of Alzheimer's disease, and "No Privacy," about homelessness, to critical acclaim. He staged "No Privacy" again at the 2015 Fringe.
In July 2014, Tony Moore directed the Adelaide premiere of Ian McGrath's Ettie's Boys, about the WWI nurse Ettie Rout, coinciding with the publication of the play by Moore Books SA, which was crowdfunded through the Pozible website.