Image by Stephen Reinhardt
Roomba Nation is a thought experiment about the meeting place of modern technology, represented by the Roomba, and clowning in the setting of a clinical farce. Hurrah Hurrah is looking to explore the emotional unrest and dis-ease technological advancement induces for those who need a miracle.
Image by Clare Hawley
In a world premier, Justin Fleming connects Adolf Hitler and Richard Wagner across time through a love of art and opera. Asking the tough questions about want, creation, and responsibility, DRESDEN seeks to complicate the way we interpret both small moments and their influence on the large names of our history.
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.
Troilus & Cressida is one of Shakespeare’s infrequently performed plays, most likely due to the ambiguous characterisation and plot. Set in the final years of the Trojan War, the play is largely a satire of the great legends from the Odyssey including Ulysses, Agamemnon, and Hector. Coincidentally, there’s the added interest of the love story between Cressida, Calchas’s daughter, and Troilus, son of Priam and Prince of Troy. Secret House’s most recent revival of the play argues for its contemporary relevance with questions of identity, love, and war.
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.
Night Writes 