Image by 51 Watts Design
Ninefold reworks Macbeth as a quick supernatural thriller about the dark motivations of ambition and control. Director, Shy Magsalin, integrates the Suzuki Method of Actor Training in a physically and stylistically challenging staging of this wyrd story. Wyrd: the Season of the Witch is Shakespeare shifted and reimagined in a way you haven’t seen before.
Image by Bree Bain
Lauren and Gideon have just broken up and they’re tearing their friendship group apart. After torching all of her ex’s things, Lauren decides to funnel all of her destructive energy into writing the next bestseller, Things Not to do After a Breakup, full of rules and advice to make sure you don’t embarrass yourself, or break the law, after your own breakup.
Image by John Marmaras
David once planned to kill a man. A man he hadn’t seen for a long time; a man he didn’t think he would ever see again. This man, the Bogeyman, raped David when he was seven years old and it’s time for revenge. Based on playwright David Holthouse’s own experiences and adapted with Markus Potter, Stalking the Bogeyman is a tense telling of trauma and the aftermath for a young boy and his future self.
Finally, Australia gets its own superhero! But, knowing the work and activism of playwright Nakkiah Lui, it’s not going to be that simple. Following Blackie Blackie Brown along her quest for vengeance, this new Australian work is loud, provocative, bloody, and a lot of fun.
Following middle-aged Sandra as she battles through the Sydney housing shortage after her housemates give her two weeks to leave, Brooke Robinson’s new work introduces a critical conversation to the Sydney stage. When we’re all familiar with the housing crisis on a macro scale through rising house prices and sales of car-sized land going for millions of dollars, Good Cook. Friendly. Clean. is a confronting portrayal of the personal cost for someone who slips through the cracks and is routinely denied basic human necessities.
Constructed as verbatim theatre out of interviews Catherine McGregor has given over her lifetime, Still Point Turning: the Catherine McGregor Story is less a narrative, or the ever popular trans narrative, and more a staged biopic, simply explaining what happened and what it felt like for McGregor to live through it. I had a lot of misgivings about this production when it was first announced; thinking that with her politics and position, McGregor didn’t have anything new to say to me. After reading assistant director Charles O’Grady’s Audrey Journal article about his experience within the production and considering McGregor’s impact on Australian discourse throughout her transition, I realised I was approaching this story all wrong.
Image by John Marmaras
During a drug trial for a new anti-depressant, two young participants begin to fall in love and threaten to derail the entire experiment. Meanwhile, the psychiatrists behind the trial are still unsure whether their experiment is proving anything at all. The Effect is a story about the boundary between the mind and the heart and whether the embracing of science and reason will destroy our conception of emotion or how we express love.
Adolescence is really, really hard but add on an unwell dad, struggling mum, burgeoning sexual relationship, and an absurd blueberry costume and it can all become overwhelming very quickly. Staged as part of Griffin’s Batch Festival, Ang Collins’s Blueberry Play is an emotional roller coaster through a 17-year-old’s life in small town Australia. Plus, there are some pretty schnazzy labrador animations.
Based on Eimear McBride’s 2013 novel of the same name, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is a brutal and unrelenting portrayal of the life of a young Irish woman from before her birth into her early 20s. Seeming to move from trauma to trauma and diving deep into the horrors of poverty, sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, illness and death, the protagonist understandably struggles to understand herself through the lenses that the surrounding world imposes on her.
Two sisters in Sydney’s western suburbs grow up together, teaching each other about how to love themselves, connect with others, and understand the world around them. After a medical scare, older sister Christa hatches the perfect plan to help younger Jamie overcome her mental health issues and hermit-like lifestyle but, like a lot of sibling interactions, she realises she’s gone much too far. This debut production for Pip & Han Inc. shows us how love can steer you so wrong.
Night Writes 