Overview
Ready, set, subscribe. Sydney's theatre companies have started rolling out their plans for season 2012, and they have us excited already.
Belvoir launched their new season on the weekend, inviting back many of their favourite players from this year and mixing in some vital new blood. Resident director Simon Stone (The Wild Duck, Baal) will adapt and direct two more classics for the stage: Eugene O'Neill's epic Strange Interlude (starring Emily Barclay) and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (with Colin Friels). The production that brought the young director to everyone's attention in the first place, Thyestes, from the Hayloft Project, will finally get a Sydney outing, too, at CarriageWorks during the Sydney Festival.
Artistic director Ralph Myers will make his Belvoir directing debut (set design is normally his bag) with Noel Coward's Private Lives, utilising the very charming Toby Schmitz and Eloise Mignon as his barb-slinging divorcees, while Benedict Andrews (The Seagull, Measure for Measure) is also trying out a new role, having written the intriguing Every Breath, which he'll also direct. Other highlights include the collaboration of playwright Rita Kalnejais and director Eamon Flack — both dazzling, young and clever — for Babyteeth, and in the Downstairs Theatre, a version of Medea that promises to do for the Euripides classic what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead did for Hamlet. See the full program here.
Over at the SBW Stables, the Griffin Theatre vision — to present the best in new and canonical Australian playwriting and support artists from inspiration through development to the stage — is written all over their 2012 season. They've extended their main season from five to six productions, making room for an encore run of Paul Capsis's sweet matriarchal ode, Angela's Kitchen. But first they'll kick things off with a headline piece of Griffin heritage, The Boys, in association with the Sydney Festival. Artistic director Sam Strong will direct this hypnotising, terrifying portrait of male rage that swagged so many AWGIEs and AFIs, and he'll also helm the later Between Two Waves, Ian Meadows' climate change/relationship drama, the first production to grow out of the Griffin Studio development program.
Rounding out the main stage programming, The Story of Mary Maclane by Herself will bring together musician Tim Rogers and a historical wild woman, while the 2011 Griffin Award-winning A Hoax (coproduced with La Boite and directed by Lee Lewis) will rip into the culture of celebrity and the commodification of abuse. Meanwhile, the independent season (shows picked by Griffin to play but produced by others, both emerging and established) will bring The New Electric Ballroom in association with the Siren Theatre Company (As You Like It), Porn Cake with Michael Sieders and The Sea Project with Arthur. Finally, Tim Roseman from London's cutting-edge Theatre503 will come over to help pull off Rapid Write, for which writers will only start pitching their most of-the-now ideas a few weeks before opening.
Can't wait for next year? Check out Griffin's Smashed and Belvoir's Human Interest Story right now.