Life Without Me
If you don't know who you are and you don't know where you're headed, you might find yourself spiralling in ever-tightening circles until you come to rest in a nondescript part of town in a crummy two-star hotel, where the service is churlish, the lift doesn't work, the toast is burnt and the pot plants set off your allergies. But keep your expectations low, really low, and, who knows' you might be pleasantly surprised by how everything works out. A hotel with reservations. Award-winning playwright Daniel Keene's play is an eccentric fable about taking up residence and trying to move on.
Fast Food
An original, poignant comedy that flips an ordinary day in a chain restaurant, and propels us into the fantasies of its protagonists. Fast Food looks at the gig economy through the lives of five people just trying to dream of something better. Some are there by choice, others just haven't figured out what else they should be doing. Life starts to take on a new meaning when hands are busy ... and hearts and minds begin to wander. Developed through the Red Stitch INK new writing program, this is the second INK commission from playwright Morgan Rose, following her acclaimed work, desert, 6:29pm. Real, intelligent and incredibly funny, Fast Food is a moving, exhilarating piece about the realities of the fast-paced, soul-crushing world of ultra convenience.
Remember Ronald Ryan and Ryan
The human and political story of the last man to be executed in Australia, Remember Ronald Ryan won the 1995 Victorian Premier's Literary Award. Dickins portrays the man behind the legend as loveable, cheeky, courageous, and wretched. This edition includes a new monologue spoken from Ryan's perspective that 'speaks to a new audience from his poor and unmarked grave'.
City of Gold
Young actor Breythe left Kalgoorlie dreaming of a dazzling career. Now he's found himself starring in a controversial Australia Day ad that pays big, but draws the ire of his mob. Racism is subtle but persistent in an industry where directors request he darken up for 'authenticity' and typecast him as 'tracker, ' 'drinker' or 'thief'. Returning home, Breythe's just as alienated from country and lore. His cultural capital distances him from furious brother Mateo and activist sister Carina, all of them struggling with regret and responsibility after their father's death. City of Gold is Meyne Wyatt's howl of rage at the injustice, inequality and willful amnesia of this country's 21st century. The global Black Lives Matter movement and more Deaths in Custody in Australia show not enough has changed. This is still an urgent and necessary play for our times from a vital voice.
End Of.
There's no crueler thing you can say to an actor than 'Don't quit your day job'. Fortunately, thanks to cover bands and theatre restaurants, Ash Flanders never needed one. But after years of glittering appearances on stages and in school gyms across the country, Ash unceremoniously finds himself seated at a computer terminal in a decidedly un-sparkly corporate office. No longer an acclaimed playwright and performer, Ash is now a legal transcriptionist-typing the words of suspected criminals who are not nearly as fascinating as TV suggested. As Ash painstakingly types out the narratives of petty crims, he begins to interrogate his own poor choices. That thing he did in an abandoned carpark. The visit to the horse knackery. Those people at the old folks home. All of it in service of one thing: making people laugh. But as his own transcript unravels, Ash realises it's about making her laugh. His toughest audience. A heavy-drinking, chain-smoking behemoth named Heather Flanders. And her health is getting so dire it's, well ... laughable. Ash Flanders (Blackie Blackie Brown) is a consummate showman-an awarded writer, actor, and elder millennial shaman. But in End Of. he is stripped uncommonly bare. Ash has created an honest, hilarious gut punch of a one-man show ... End of.
Cut Snake
Kiki, Bob and Jumper are best friends with extravagant and idiosyncratic dreams. Kiki wants to dance the tango on Mount Kilimanjaro with a bearded lady, Jumper is in love with a snake called Trix and Bob's an ordinary bloke who might just hold the secret to time travel. Join them for the wild ride. Cut Snake is a comedy about growing up, dying young, and being extraordinary no matter what.
Sex Magick
After a workplace indiscretion shatters his elite footy physiotherapy career, Ard Panicker finds himself begging for work at a metaphysical health spa, selling Ayurvedic rubdowns to yummy mummies in Bondi. With his sense of self at an all time low and staring down a sea of healing crystals, green juices and sound baths, Ard wonders how the hell his life took him from sport to spirituality in one fell swoop. His search for answers takes him to Kerala, South India, where he meets an enlightened and enigmatic tantric guru. But when he returns to Sydney, Ard's body begins to shudder with mysterious seizures-accompanied by waking visions of a terrifying, all-powerful deity. What happened to Ard in India? ... And will he ever get his mind back? From the brilliant brain of playwright Nicholas Brown, Sex Magick is a wildly funny (and just plain wild) exploration of queerness, masculinity and South Asian-Australian identity.
Mortido
聶Como sabes que esto no es el sue簽o? (How do you know this is not the dream?) How do you know this is not the nightmare?' Mortido is a remarkable crime drama, revenge tragedy and morality play all rolled into one. Jimmy is a small-time dealer and Monte is a biggish-time distributor. Grubbe is a detective. They all want the same thing: to live out their lives in leisure. And a water view would be nice. But for Jimmy and Monte to win, Grubbe has to lose. Same goes the other way.It begins with a Mexican fable about death and ends in the Western suburbs of Sydney. In between it takes in the public housing on Belvoir Street, Krispy Kreme doughnuts, quinoa, Nazi Germany, Qantas, Coca-Cola, a seventh birthday party, the Surry Hills police, the property market and a body in the harbour. The connective tissue? Cocaine. This is Betzien's most ambitious play so far, and a brilliant portrait of the Emerald City: familiar, bizarre, glorious and mean. A quintessential Sydney tale about crime, globalisation and the killer desire for a bigger house.
The Appleton Ladies' Potato Race
In the tidy town of Appleton, things are just so. Men are men, women are women, and vegetables are not cake ... and that's the way it's always been. That is, until prodigal daughter Penny returns from the big smoke to set up shop as the local GP. Penny was always something of an outsider. While she was off getting educated and travelling the world, the good folk of Appleton kept about their business - living hard and working harder, and trying not to stuff things up too much before each year's great event, the famous Appleton Potato Race. Penny never much cared about the potato race, but when she discovers that the men's prize is five times more than the women's, she suddenly does care. A lot. And she's determined to do something about it. Melanie Tait's sparkling comedy The Appleton Ladies' Potato Race pits social justice against community cohesion in a race to be right. With a sackful of appealing characters, Tait's dry humour and warm embrace of humanity will have you laughing all the way to the finish line. 'Pure theatrical rambunctiousness' - ArtsHub 'Melanie Tait has written a shrewd, big-hearted love letter to the women of country New South Wales. Her script is gently critical and deeply loving.' - Time Out
The World According to Dinosaurs
Are you alive? Yes. Are you dead? No. Are you real? Yes... Are we considered a protein or a fatty acid? I don't know, it wasn't on the wiki page. The World According to Dinosaurs by Belle Hansen and Amelia Newman is an interrogation of globalism through the lens of palaeontology, world events and what we had for dinner last night. A culmination of the stories we tell ourselves about existence. This is a work of physical theatrical grandeur that journeys across genre and time.
The House on the Lake
""I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then."" A criminal lawyer with a cool head and a passion for logic, David wakes up to find himself confined to a small, sparsely furnished room, unable to remember what happened the day before. With the help of his doctor, David begins to coax memories out of the darkness, before the details of a terrible secret emerge. Razor sharp and tourniquet tight, The House on the Lake is a psychological thriller so crafty it's criminal. Mired deep in layers of deception, it's a puzzle of a play certain to engage the intellect and assault the nervous system.
Don't Say the Words
'The wheels in the gravel driveway. The door. Him coming home. I was waiting because I hadn't seen him in a long time. I hadn't been alone with him in so long...' After a decade under siege a city has finally fallen. But ten years of rage have taken their toll. For an officer returning from this epic overseas campaign, it is time to put the horrors of battle behind him, and to take back his place at the family table. For the officer's wife, it is time to take her revenge... Tom Holloway's 'epic-in-miniature' is inspired by Aeschylus' Agamemnon and a truly contemporary Australian landscape - with breathtaking results.
The Voices Project 2013
I'm a clown. I know that now. I make people laugh. I make people scream. I make people throw up lasagne in the toilet for half an hour. I make them change phone numbers. I make them tell their friends to tell me it's not my fault, that sometimes... these things happen. Out of Place is a beautifully crafted collection of seven-minute monologues presenting young characters who laugh, tease and tell stories to make your toes curl. Out of Place is the latest installment in The Voices Project, ATYP's overwhelmingly successful program designed to nurture and showcase the talents of Australia's best young playwrights. Each piece takes a captivating look at what happens when people are placed just outside their comfort zone.
The Heartbreak Choir
From the revered playwright behind one of Melbourne Theatre Company's most beloved recent hits, The Architect, comes this funny and uplifting celebration of music, friendship and community. The Heartbreak Choir is a warm-hearted hug of a play that will make you want to sing out loud. In the old CFA hall on the outskirts of town, a small group of locals come together to sing, and to connect. Aseni, Barbara, Mack, Savannah and Totty have splintered from their original choir on a matter of principle and are intent on forging their own path. With their latest recruit Peter along for the ride, they have a new name, a space to rehearse in and a public debut booked. All they need now is to right the wrongs of the past... and to find a song that pairs perfectly with the local winery's Sangiovese. Brought to the stage by The Architect director Peter Houghton, The Heartbreak Choir is a joyful, song-filled snapshot of a devastated community learning how to heal. This emotionally resonant MTC NEXT STAGE commission is the last work from playwright Aidan Fennessy - a fitting final act of togetherness.
Them
across the sea that separates us from them life waits for us on the other side and I can't go there without you... In an unnamed city at war, five young people count down the days before a boat leaves for Europe. Who will leave, who will stay, and what will their choices cost them? From the writer of the award-winning Tales of a City by the Sea. Winner of the Green Room Independent Theatre Award for Writing 2020 Shortlisted for the NSW and Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2020 'A drama dappled with humanity and humour amid the horrors of war [...] The inextinguishable spirit of laughter, of the music of life in the face of desolation, is crucial to both the play's poignancy and appeal.' - Sydney Morning Herald
The Secret River
Convict William Thornhill, exiled from the stinking slums of early 19th century London, discovers that the penal colony offers something that he never dared to hope for before: a place of his own. A stretch of land on the Hawkesbury River is Thornhill's for the taking. As he and his family seek to establish themselves in this unfamiliar territory, they find that they are not the only ones to lay a claim to the land. The Hawkesbury is already home to a family of Dharug people, who are reluctant to leave on account of these intruders. As Thornhill's attachment to the place and the dream deepens, he is driven to make a terrible decision that will haunt him for the rest of his life. Adapted for the stage from the novel by Kate Grenville.
Wayside Bride
Street people and celebrities, cross-cultural lovers and interfaith mavericks all have been warmly welcomed at Sydney's Wayside Chapel. Founded by the Reverend Ted and Margaret Noffs, whose passion for the family of humanity was equalled by their love for each other, the Wayside Chapel has married over 50,000 couples. Including playwright Alana Valentine's own mother. When Alana discovers the dress that her mother wore to her pre-wedding meeting with Ted, she makes her own vow: to seek out stories of religious rebellion in Australia during the seventies. What unfolds is her excavation of layers of family history, buried under the pressures of conservative religious doctrine, racial segregation and class warfare. Based on over 50 interviews with real couples married at the Wayside Chapel, Wayside Bride is a communion with a quiet revolution that began in a Kings Cross side street; at weddings where queer men found in a nearby bar substitute for absent fathers, where rival pastors cry heresy, and where the lonely and discarded are offered a home. Come in. We'd be delighted to have you join us for the ceremony. 'A tribute to real love and belonging a perfect bouquet toss for these times.' The Guardian 'A story trying to encompass fifty years of history and the struggles is actually a story about the endurance of empathy and the power of love.' Theatre Now
The Hanging
'We're a circle. We're forever. For eternity.' Three teenage schoolgirls go missing in Melbourne's hinterland. The clock is ticking, the search is on. One of the girls turns up days later. Confused and unkempt, she has no apparent memory of what happened and where her friends are. Sound familiar? The Hanging is a gripping thriller that questions the frequently occurring spectre of the missing girl in the Australian bush. Its mystery is a postmodern study of social panic and what lies hidden, just out of reach.
The Ham Funeral
Rejected by the 1962 Adeladie Festival Board of Governors as 'unappetising fare' - The Ham Funeral is now considered a modern classic. Set in a squalid British boarding house, the play tells the story of a young poet, who lodges with Mr and Mrs Lusty, a bloated, gluttonous pair. When her husband dies abruptly, Mrs Lusty announces a grand funeral featuring a lavish feast, in his honour. Driven by her incontinent appetite, she attempts to seduce the young poet, with comically tragic consequences.
Waltzing the Wilarra
Charlie, Elsa and Fay take you on a musical journey back to 1940s post-war Perth. Against a backdrop of curfews, and the fear of arrest for consorting, white and black manage to form their own club. For a night they can forget their worries and experience rare happy times singing, dancing, listening to music, and with a little luck... romance. Forty years on, as the club faces demolition, our three characters meet once again to stage a musical reunion and protest in an attempt to save their old stomping ground. As the trio reflects upon loves lost and found, old arguments and alliances resurface. Dark secrets and ghosts that have lingered for more than half a century are revealed, and we discover that reconciliation is more than saying sorry.
The Voices Project
Since its inception in 2011, ATYP's Voices Project has been cultivating the talents of the best young Australian actors and writers. Every year, twenty young Australian writers are chosen to each write a seven-minute monologue for a young actor, bringing to audiences the cutting edge of Australian theatre. This selection of seventeen monologues takes the reader through the themes that have been explored in the Voices Project over the years, varying from first love to food, telling the stories of Australia. By turns witty, touching and chilling, the monologues of the Voices Project explore, deconstruct and subvert our perceptions of modern Australian life.
Good Works
Would you ruin someone's life, separate them from their soulmate and their only son, all the time telling yourself you're doing the right thing? Leaping back and forth between the 1920s and the 1980s, Good Works follows the lives of two women and their two sons as they struggle to cram their complex lives within the narrow confines of Catholic morality. By turns angry, incisive, tender and tragic, Good Works is Nick Enright's most complex and most personal play. 'Enright has fashioned an extremely complex, difficult and complex play, emotionally charged, intellectually challenging. It is without doubt destined to become a major work in the Australian theatre.' Angela Bennie, Sydney Morning Herald, 1994 'Nick Enright's Good Works is one of the most moving, absorbing and powerful new plays produced in Sydney in a long time. It is an exciting work by an experienced writer who has finally found his personal voice.' John McCallum, The Australian, 1994 'It seems to me to be a play we have been waiting for for years now. Passionate, argumentative, yet thoroughly dramatic, realist in its concerns, yet dexterous in its use of symbolism... it is a stunning achievement.' Guy Rundle, The Age, 1995
Miss Peony
Lily's grandmother was a beauty queen back in Hong Kong. She doesn't care that times have changed, that Lily lives in a new country and a new century. She sees a granddaughter caught between worlds. So Poh Poh pushes Lily into entering the highly competitive Miss Peony, and no matter how hard Lily tries to wriggle out of it, her grandma won't take no for an answer. And to make matters worse, she's a ghost. Glitzy and madcap, Miss Peony by award-winning writer Michelle Law is a bold new comedy about our good old need for connection to family, the past, the future, each other.
RUNT & kerosene
Two women, two plays, two powerful voices. This double volume pairs powerhouse playwright Patricia Cornelius, in collaboration with Susie Dee and Nicci Wilks, with rising star Benjamin Nichol in two searing monodramas about women who are dispossessed and dismissed. In RUNT, Cornelius, Dee and Wilks have created an expansive work about the runts of this world-the lesser, the weak, the insignificant, the 'unders'. Runt, a small woman who has endured nothing but misery, toughens up to face her oppressors and fight for equality and decency. But just as she starts to sense greatness rising in her, something shifts and she feels the dirt sucking her back in. [Cornelius's] art has a conscious rhythm, poetry and structure that make other writers seethe with envy. Her language doesn't sound naturalistic but when it's spoken by an actor, it sounds like it could never be anything but their voice. - Time Out In kerosene, Nichol's unlikely protagonist Millie yearns for love and acceptance, finding instead rejection and humiliation at every turn ... except from her sad, soft old grandfather, and her best friend Annie. Millie shapes her loyalty to Annie into a bond that burns hotter than any romantic furnace. Life sends them on different paths, but when Annie turns up bruised and bloodied on the doorstep, Millie sets out to honour her childhood friend in the only way she knows how: revenge. Nichol builds a world that is dense and rich with life. The writing is so subtle but poignant, with dialogue that carries the audience down a path that we can all relate to, even if we haven't walked it ourselves. - Australian Arts Review
The Great
The Great is Tony McNamara's distinctive comic take on the rise and reign of Catherine the Great of Russia. The action spans the course of Catherine's adult life as she learns the ways of the world and takes on the challenge of political power with all of its attendant responsibilities, excesses and sorrows. It is at once a coming of age story, a family drama and a wild satire on power. With an attention to veracity that would make Monty Python squeal, history is well and truly damned. Leave the facts with your car keys and your towel on the Sands of Time, come, frolic in the Sea of Great Unlikelihood...
Archimedes War
Arki hasn't been sleeping well. At night, he is haunted by visions of fallen bodies. Arki isn't a soldier, nor a general, nor a civilian caught in the crossfire. He loves to game. And it's all just a game, isn't it? Aaron hasn't been sleeping well. Day and night, he is haunted by visions from his recent tour in Afghanistan. But it's all in the past, isn't it? Sayf hasn't been sleeping well. Someone pilfered the sword from his restaurant, and he's pretty sure it's that soldier from the other night. The loud one. The rude one. The one who reminds him of all the other Australian soldiers who stormed his home back in Afghanistan. When the firing has ended and the game closed, how long will the damage remain? Melissa Reeves' Archimedes War presents a dark and comic study of the depersonalisation of modern warfare. After trauma, how do we pause? Resume? Exit? Winner of the Griffin Award 2016 and Finalist for the Victorian Premier's Prize for Drama 2022. 'Beautifully structured, thoughtful, cunning in the way it puts its issues before us.' - Michael Brindley, Stage Whispers
Cathedral
A man kneels by his dive gear. It's late afternoon on the Limestone Coast. He has a story to tell. It starts in the water. A powerful, visceral and form-busting new work by award-winning South Australian born playwright Caleb Lewis, Cathedral is a thriller, a family drama and an epic journey of self-discovery. From Mount Gambier to Thailand to the North Sea, from soaring first love to shattering loss to ultimate hope, this powerful story ponders a diver's life shaped by the ocean, and its power to both upend and heal. An ultimately life-affirming piece of storytelling, Cathedral asks the question: do we turn away from our pain, or dive right in?
Odyssey
Andreas Litras' remarkable one-hander play Odyssey interweaves three narratives: Homer's Odyssey, the ancient tale, provides the template for an enactment of Litras' parents', Angelo and Paraskevi's migration to Australia; and the performer's personal search for a sense of identity and belonging as the son of Greek immigrants. Litreas weaves the stories of his family through the legend of Odysseus, the hero of the Trojan War. In this beautifully crafted autobiography we witness Greek tragedy, comedy and the everyday. Truly epic drama.
The Voices Project 2011 & 2012
The Voices Project 2011 & 2012 is a collection of seven-minute monologues tailored for young adult actors. Developed by Australian Theatre for Young People working with some of the country's most exciting young playwrights, these powerful short stories are as diverse and vibrant as the young people that inspired them. This collection features the scripts from the productions Tell It Like It Isn't (2011) exploring the theme of 'first love', and The One Sure Thing (2012) exploring 'first death'.
Cyberbile and Grounded
Based on interviews conducted by PLC students with teachers, parents and their fellow students, Cyberbile is a verbatim-based drama about children's relationships to the online community and the bullying that modern technology can unleash. In Grounded we meet Farrah, a young Novocastrian with a fascination for Newcastle's industrial port, a fascination none of her peers share or comprehend. When a storm grounds a ship, the Pasha Bulker, and the world's attention turns to the harbour she knows so well, the impact on Farrah's own reality is not what she expects.
Endangered
Three plays that make a powerful statement on Australia's relationship with the environment in the shadow of global warming. With an introduction by Chris Mead.They Saw a Thylacine by Justine Campbell and Sarah HamiltonOut of the darkness, Justine Campbell and Sarah Hamilton conjure the ghost of one of Australia's lost beauties, the thylacine. With all the suspense of a campfire story, these feisty, funny women weave a lyrical tale of adversity and extinction. For this thylacine tracker and this zoo keeper's daughter, it's a quest not just to protect a threatened creature, but themselves. Rebellious and gutsy, these women face life and fight to survive.Extinction by Hannie RaysonExtinction delves deep into the heart of our own morals, choices and tightly held convictions. It wraps an important conservation message around a unique and personal human story. A wild, rainy night, a twist of fate and an injured tiger quoll bring together a passionate environmentalist and an unlikely Good Samaritan. Both are hell-bent on saving the species, but intentions are murky. What will be compromised in the quest to save the quoll? Nothing is black and white in this intriguing story about love, sex, money and power.The Honey Bees by Caleb LewisAs the world's honeybees disappear, a family-owned apiary struggles to keep up with overseas demand. Driven by matriarch Joan's iron will, the business continues to grow. And then Melissa arrives out of the blue. The Honey Bees is a tale of family and empire; action and consequences; and what happens when the bee finally stings.
Parramatta Girls and Eyes to the Floor
The inmates of the Girls Training School (GTS) Parramatta had about as hard an upbringing as you can get in Australia. But theirs is also one of the great untold stories of making good in tough times.Parramatta Girls is based on the testimony of dozens of GTS old-girls. This vibrant play is a joyous and harrowing dramatisation of the experiences of eight inmates and their reunion 40 years later. Interspersed with song and storytelling, this is a tribute to mischief and humour in the face of hardship and inequality.Eyes to the Floor chronicles the experience of girls sent from Parramatta Girls Home to the Hay Girls Home for even more brutal, punitive treatment. Written to be played by young adults, this moving work emphasises the childlike vulnerability of the inmates in a world where they must find connection with each other in order to survive. Artfully woven with movement, chorus work and poetry, it is a compelling companion work to Parramatta Girls.
Mr Melancholy and Footprints on Water
Mr. Melancholy is an absurd comedy of solitude and sorrow. Three hermits, living in a lighthouse without a light, discover a runaway circus clown washed ashore. 'Cameron seems heir to the existentialism of a Samuel Beckett, the absurdities of a Goon Show and the hauntingly melancholic whimsy of cartoonist Michael Leunig.' - The Bulletin Footprints on Water is a darkly comic parable of belief and judgement. A religious zealot wills God to wipe out his morally bankrupt village so he can start the world again. 'Exudes a palpable sense of apocalypse. If Footprints on Water is any indication, Australian theatre is in safe hands.' - The Age
Staging Asylum, Again
Introducing Staging Asylum, Again, an anthology that exposes Australia's mistreatment of people seeking refuge. Building on the success of its predecessor, this collection presents a timely and powerful exploration archive of artistic resistance to one of Australia's most enduring and unjust policies.The anthology showcases a diverse range of plays that delve into different facets of seeking asylum. Tribunal, devised and performed by Kaz Therese, Joe Tan, Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor, Mahdi Mohammadi, Katie Green, Paul Dwyer, and Jawad Yaqoubi, immerses readers in a truth and reconciliation commission, where newly arrived refugees and a First Nations Elder share poignant testimonies. We All Know What's Happening, conceived by Samara Hersch and Lara Thoms, involves seven young Australians devising a show about the incarceration of refugee children their age. Finally, The Audition, written by Patricia Cornelius, Sahra Davoudi, Tes Lyssiotis, Wahibe Moussa, Milad Norouzi, Melissa Reeves, and Christos Tsiolkas, is a metatheatrical play that draws parallels between an actor's audition and an asylum seeker's application for protection. The volume also includes three one-act plays showcased at the 2015 Asylum festival. No禱lle Janaczewska's Going for Gold, Tania Ca簽as' Three Angry Australians, and Georgia Symon's A Puppet Show for All Ages.Editors Tania Ca簽as and Caroline Wake provide an introduction to the volume, along with individual essays about each play. Staging Asylum, Again is a testament to the power of theatre to shed light on injustice and spark dialogue, making it an essential read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of Australia's border policies and their impacts.
Zeal Theatre Collection
The Stones is based on a true story of two boys charged with manslaughter after throwing rocks from a freeway overpass and killing a motorist. This internationally renowned play was created in 1996 and has been produced world-wide including at: the National Theatre (London); New Victory Theatre (New York); De Krakeling (Amsterdam); and in a cow shed in Horn-Zaingrub, Austria. Burnt is set in the fictitious town of Gilpendry. Its story is borne out of the true stories of people from regional Australia struggling with prolonged drought, and in particular how the stresses and strains of continued drought impacts on families and young people. Taboo deals with date rape, internet dating, and the ripple effects of sexual assault. Commissioned by the Sydney Theatre Company.
Muff, MinusOneSister and SHIT
A passionate and unflinching collection of three award-winning plays by and about women, featuring an introduction by Alison Croggon. In Muff by Van Badham, the wounds of a horrific event are re-opened as Eve tries to navigate a friendship with her ex and his new partner. The play uses both grim sadness and dark humour to challenge perceptions of feminism and self-image in the prism of sexual love. Winner of the 2015 NSW Premier's Award for Drama in 2015. 'An intelligent, challenging, deeply thoughtful and highly original piece of work. In a world where gender relationships remain the minefield they always were, and where male violence towards women remains writ large... this is a play for our time and a groundbreaking piece of theatre.' - NSW Premier's Award judge's report Anna Barnes' MinusOneSister is a contemporary retelling of Sophocles' classic tragedy, Electra. The teenage siblings take the stage, and loyalties are challenged as each confronts their own grief and guilt. Barnes challenges patterns of blame that persist today when dealing with violence and sexuality. Winner of the 2013 Patrick White Playwrights' Award. 'Barnes has tapped into something essential and immediate about young women, about anxiety and terror and anger and a constant, destructive lack of control over their own bodies and lives.' - Time Out Patricia Cornelius' SHIT is rife with ugliness. Billy, Bobby and Sam speak with the voices of those who've survived foster care, institutionalisation, and neglect. They love no-one and no-one loves them. They believe the world is shit, that their lives are shit, that they are shit. Winner of the 2015 Green Room Awards for Independent Theatre: Best Production and Best Writing and the 2017 Sydney Theatre Award for Best New Australian Work, and shortlisted for the 2016 Victorian Premier's Award for Drama. 'Cornelius looks deep into the hearts and minds of those who have been pushed aside, and finds contradictions that are at once complex, difficult, admirable and scary.' - Ben Neutze, Daily Review
Peter Brook and the Mahabharata
First published in 1991, Peter Brook and the Mahabharata is a collection of essays which contextualizes the production of Peter Brook's The Mahabharata.
The Jack Manning Trilogy
In this trilogy, David Williamson explores community conferencing, a process which brings together the victims and the perpetrators of a crime in an attempt at some kind of reconciliation.Face to Face: When Glen comes face to face with the employee who rammed his Mercedes, he must acknowledge some responsibility for a series of incidents that helped provoke the crime.A Conversation revolves around the confrontation between the family of a rapist and murderer, and the family of his victim.Charitable Intent focuses on the pressures and contradictions that erupt as workplace values change.
Lovely Lovely Sometimes Ugly
In Lovely Lovely Sometimes Ugly, a collection of four plays by one of Australia's most fearless playwrights, Patricia Cornelius displays all her skill, wit, beauty and anger, and serves them up like a still beating heart on a chipped plate.Cornelius's signature grungy poetic style is at its finest in the early play Love, a brutally beautiful journey into the emotional core of three broken souls in a broken world.In SLUT, a short, sharp stab into the heart of internalised misogyny, Cornelius explores the life and perceived crimes of Lolita, a schoolgirl whose sexual confidence both frightens and fascinates her peers.In The Club takes us into the adrenalin-fuelled, macho-pumped world of professional footballers and its intersection with slut-shaming and issues of consent.And in the sweeping, Lorca-inspired The House of Bernadette, the family of women left behind after the death of a patriarch is a goldmine of female desire, sexual repression, and individual compromise.[Her work] channels the power of resisting received literary tradition in order to open up a space where the lives of characters on the margins can become vessels of universal truths. Windham-Campbell Award judges.
Red Sky Morning
Three family members, three monologues, one day, and a heartbreaking tragedy of miscommunication.
Monument
'The fuchsia is bright.' Edith Aldridge is the youngest woman to be elected leader of her country. In a lush presidential suite in a heritage listed hotel, she has just 90 minutes to get ready for the biggest day of her life. Enter Rosie, a 22-year-old makeup artist from the David Jones counter, sent to help Edith get camera ready. In Rosie's capable hands, this morning will be a breeze. So long as they both stick to the brief. Emily Sheehan's astute and entertaining Monument challenges the trivialisation of beauty therapy, exploring the role that makeup and fashion play in how we perceive and receive women in power. 'Sheehan's voice is sparkling, fresh, and urgently of the now.' - Arts Hub2022 Finalist Max Afford Playwrights Award Monument was developed through Red Stitch's INK program.
Don's Party
It's election night 1969. Don and Kath hope that there will be a change of government, and give a party to watch the results. As the tide turns against Labor, the good cheer palls and the faded ideals and disappointed hopes of the characters begin to show. Williamson's brilliant satire examines a society on the threshold of emerging from a generation of comfortable, conservative political and social values.
The Plan (And Other Plans)
Rosie and Gen's parents are divorced, making their trips back to their hometown a complicated journey of passive aggression and massive regression. There's something about going back to your hometown that makes you feel so big yet so small at the same time. When their Paul Kelly-obsessed dad falls ill, they alternate taking leave from their jobs to care for him. Introducing: the Cancer Calendar. Why use emotion when you have Excel Spreadsheet? Rosie and Gen try to hold onto their current lives, relationships and jobs in the face of loss and the dawning realisation that they don't know as much about their parents as they thought. Growing up once is hard, but growing up again as an adult is harder. The Plan (and Other Plans) is a hilarious, messy and big-hearted comedy, laced with quintessential Aussie humour, featuring a nostalgic soundtrack of Paul Kelly hits.
Woman in the Window
Two worlds ruled by terror interact: Russia's poet-hero Anna Akhmatova is under house arrest in Stalinist Leningrad, while her friends attempt to save her writings. In a futuristic Australia, a similar oppression by corporate society has suppressed all memory of literature and the natural world.
The Kid
The play that launched Michael Gow's playwriting career.In blazing heat, a stolen Mini hurtles towards Sydney. Inside, three unstable teenagers from the country - Snake, Aspro and Dean - plan a future that will begin when they collect Aspro's accident compo from the Department.Joined by Donald, an opera fanatic desperate for a change of scene, they travel to the city to take up residence in 'the largest block of flats in the Southern Hemisphere'.As bush fires rage on the edge of the city, they meet Desiree, a young girl from downstairs with apocalyptic predictions.Sparks fly. Tensions escalate. Twilight approaches...
At Sea, Staring Up
At Sea, Staring Up is a richly poetic magical relationship drama that follows the journeys of five characters, all motivated by love, across three continents: Emma the Greek sails the seas alone so that her father will live; Noah searches for his wife who flew through a hole in the windscreen; Elise drives through the German countryside, trying to get her baby to sleep; Caleb swims oceans to prove his love for Sylvia; while Sylvia climbs waterfalls and jumps through time and space. Told in poetic language, Kruckemeyer creates a magical world that is very real.
Navigating
A small seaside town drifts in the wake of its painful past and the corruption of its leaders. An embattled woman is determined to expose the truth when she finds herself in possession of damaging documentary evidence.
