New Zealand writer, actor and administrator (born 1971)
Philippa Hall (born 1971) is a New Zealand stage, screen and radio script writer and actor.
Biography
Background
Pip Hall is the daughter of writer Roger Hall and grew up mostly in Dunedin, New Zealand. She graduated in theatre studies and drama at the University of Otago and spent time whilst there experimenting with theatre at the Allen Hall Theatre, a working theatre space at the university. Her fellow students and contemporaries included Te Radar, Duncan Sarkies and Jesse Griffin.[1]
Career
In the early 1990s Hall started writing for television on Gibson Group sketch shows. She went on to write plays including two plays for Young & Hungry Arts Trust at BATS Theatre in Wellington[1] and has been a full time writer since 1995.[2] In 2000 Hall was the co-ordinator of Young and Hungry.[3]
Her one-act play Shudder (2003) is a popular choice to be produced in high schools in New Zealand, she has written over a dozen plays that have been produced and many were commissioned.[4][5] In 2018 Auckland Theatre Company presented her stage adaptation of New Zealand’s children's novel, Under the Mountain by Maurice Gee.[6]
Hall has written comedy, drama and documentary for television. Runaway Millionaires is the true story of a New Zealand couple Leo Gao and Kara Hurring who in 2009 received $10 million from the bank by mistake, took the money and disappeared. She says when telling a true story:
"One thing that is really interesting for me as I writer is that I try really hard not to judge any kind of behaviour. It's just my job to try and work out why they make the choices they do."[7]
Hall is co-founder of a contemporary water ballet company, Wet Hot Beauties.[8]
She was the president of the New Zealand Writers Guild for four years, and sat on the boards of WIFT (Women in Film and Television) and Playmarket, New Zealand's playwriters agency.[1]
