Image by Vicki Skarratt
Times were a-changing in mid-century Australia: the traditional gender roles were opening up to allow women to work and attend university, immigration was booming, and consumerism was on the rise as people celebrated new prosperity. Lesley Miles is on the cusp of this new world, hoping to step into herself and become something special.
Image by Clare Hawley
Ava is a young Welsh girl learning to navigate the complex and disappointing structures of adulthood. From institutionalisation to drug and alcohol abuse to inappropriate and dangerous relationships, everywhere she turns is cold and hard. As her 16th birthday approaches and she must find alternate accommodation from the children’s home, all of the threads of Ava’s distressing life become a bit too much.
Image by Miklos Varadi-Beothy
Set in the staff room of an Australian girls’ school in 1938, Morning Sacrifice is a snapshot of the everyday concerns of the time including considerations of propriety and morality, a changing political climate, and the place of education in the globalising world. With the school’s reputation to uphold, any discrepancy must be held up, identified, and swiftly punished.
The Kings are the ideal hosts, inviting guests into their home as part of their reality television program Living with the Kings, a very popular production. For this season finale they’ve invited the Wild Violets to join them, a musical duo set to send the show off with a real bang, but not without wreaking a little havoc.
Image by David Evans
Like Across the Universe, Lady Beatle uses the songs of the Beatles to reconstruct an alternate narrative, a behind the scenes to the making of the world’s largest rock band if there had been a fifth Beatle. This story, though, is almost true. There was a lady beetle that bestowed with the love and support and good luck that propelled them out of Liverpool, and this show is in tribute to him.
Image by Alison Lee Rubie
What is the measure of a life? It’s a question not often considered in the rush of living but left for the last moments of reflection when it all feels a bit too late. Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize winning script is a meditation on the boundary between life and death from the perspective of one accustomed to the event in the abstract.
Image by Brett Boardman
Have you ever loved something so much that it took over your world, pushing things like family and school into subplots and background information to the fateful love story at the centre of it all? Have you ever felt that way about someone you’ve never met? Never seen or touched in real life? Someone who doesn’t know you exist? That overwhelming, all consuming sensation is called being a fangirl.
Creative bots, algorithms, and AI that pump out scripts based on the input of thousands of human-written examples have been a source of hilarity for the last few years but what if a bot was tasked with writing a play about cyberspace, the internet, itself? The output of this hypothetical is Netgirlz, an “anti-theatre” and “anti-linear” piece bringing you the thrills of the internet in the comfort of the theatre.
Image by Chris Sullivan
Death changes everything: suddenly there’s a before and after, the continuity of a life cleft in two. In My Best Dead Friend, Anya spreads herself across this boundary to tell the story of her best friends including the Australian one, the clever one, the best one, and the dead one.
Image by Lightbox Photography
The legal profession is an opaque realm with notable barriers to entry and impenetrable jargon but popular culture genres like legal thrillers or legal dramas reveal a general interest in the world behind the courtroom. Bondi Legal exploits this interest in a comedy about the performativity and show-boating of lawyers.
Night Writes 