Dramatist dropped from festival for copying play word for word

Andre Surridge. Photo / Supplied

A play by a former Playwrights Association of New Zealand president has been disqualified from an Auckland theatre festival for plagiarism.

Squeaky Clean Hotel, "dramatised" by Andre Surridge, of Hamilton, featured in the Wildcards section of the Short+Sweet Festival at The Edge in January. It was one of 40 10-minute plays in the two-week festival.

Some members of the audience noticed that Squeaky Clean Hotel's dialogue, a series of comical letters complaining about soap between a hotel guest and management, was almost exactly the same as a sequence of fictional letters called Little Soaps in a book entitled A Hotel is a Place by American comedian Shelley Berman, published in 1972.

All the letters "written" by the guest are signed S. Berman, while Mr Surridge's hotel guest's name has been changed to Hank T. Sherman Jr. Small changes have been made to the Squeaky Clean Hotel script but it is essentially the same as Mr Berman's work.

Mr Surridge said although Short+Sweet's programme listed him as the writer of Squeaky Clean Hotel, he had only "dramatised" the piece and the plagiarism was a genuine error on his part.

"I came across the letters in an information sheet in a hotel in New Plymouth," he said.

"Of course I didn't know they were the work of one person. The sheet was introduced as, 'And you think you have problems! The following letters are taken from an actual incident between a London hotel and one of its guests. The hotel ended up submitting the letters to the London Sunday Times '."

Mr Surridge, the Playwrights Association president from 1998-2000, said he did not recognise the name S. Berman and the title Little Soaps was not on the hotel information sheet.

When a competitor approached Short+Sweet artistic director Alex Broun about the issue, he responded: "I need to handle this delicately ... I'd like to avoid a big public scandal at this stage as it will detract from the participants in the second week. And put a downer on a festival that is going really well at present ... I think Andre thought it was a true story and they were real letters."

Mr Broun this week confirmed to the Herald that the play - first performed for Short+Sweet in Sydney in 2005 - has been disqualified.

"We do not think that Andre did this deliberately. We think it's an honest mistake ... when he entered the play he did sign terms and conditions of agreement that said the play was his own work. So yes, of course it will have to be disqualified retrospectively.

"I think he'll be deeply upset about this. He is a fine playwright and it is very unfortunate that he has been tripped in this instance into believing something was real when it was the work of another writer."

Mr Surridge said he was shocked to discover the letters were Shelley Berman's work. "When I submitted Squeaky Clean Hotel to the Short+Sweet Festival, I never actually said that I had written it, only that I had dramatised the piece. Clearly the work is not mine and never was."