AN exceptional Canberra actor-playwright was presented with the Helen Tsongas Award for excellence in acting by Canberra Theatre director Alex Budd at the ACT Arts Awards tonight (November 30).

Dylan Van Den Berg was singled out by the Canberra Critics Circle for a remarkable year of acting and writing, especially in his play “Milk”, presented at The Street Theatre in June, in which he played a character with a background very much like his own.

“I am incredibly honoured to receive an award in Helen’s memory… awards like this are immensely encouraging for artists and it is a real privilege,” Van Den Berg said on learning of the decision.

In April, he also won the $30,000 Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting for “Milk” at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.

A Palawa writer/performer with family connections to the Bass Strait Islands and the north-east of Tasmania, Van Den Berg is now a full-time theatre artist, but until recently worked as inclusion and diversity adviser at Starlight Children’s Foundation Australia and before that as performance expert and Captain Starlight recruiter. 

The multi-talented Van Den Berg has a BA in drama and international communication from the ANU and a diploma in Indonesian from the University of New England, as well as qualifications in improvisation at the State University of New York. 

Very much a product of The Street Theatre, where he has performed as a professional actor many times, he came to public attention there in 2019 as Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, who turned into an insect.

He also had his plays such as “Blue: a misery play” and “The Camel” developed under the theatre’s dramaturgical programs, The Hive and First Seen.

In 2021 critics praised both the gentle restraint of his performance as a younger-generation indigenous man and the play, described by “CityNews” reviewer Joe Woodward, as “a matter of cultural necessity.”

In meeting the challenge of playing himself in “Milk”, he has said he objectified the part, declaring, “just the fact that I wrote it means I removed it from myself”.

Van Den Berg has said that he wrote the play for his baby daughter, Charlotte, to whom he said: “I wrote this play for you and you’ll know where we come from.”

The Helen Tsongas Award for excellence in acting was established by the Tsongas family in the name of the late Helen Tsongas, who died in a motorcycle accident with her husband, Peter Brajkovic, 10 years ago. 

Tsongas was a dramatic actor, memorable for tragic roles in “Medea” and “The House of Bernarda Alba”, but equally admired for her comic roles in plays such as “Noises Off” and “The Female Odd Couple”

She worked at Arts ACT for many years (former Chief Minister Jon Stanhope was, at the time, the Arts Minister) and then moved to the then Commonwealth Office for the Arts when Simon Crean was Minister.

She would have been 43 this month.

The Helen Tsongas award takes the form of $1000 and a certificate going to the best Canberra actor of the year, with no restrictions on age or gender, as judged by the theatre panel of the Canberra Critics Circle and will continue over the coming years.