Sydney Theatre Company Announces Packed 2018 Lineup

Theatre fans, prepare to get spend much of 2018 in the city's live performance venues. Sydney Theatre Company has revealed their lineup for the year ahead, and it's jam-packed with highlights, ranging from a diverse range of world premiere productions to new stagings of beloved classics to return seasons of recent favourites.

STC's first season under new artistic director Kip Williams features sixteen shows across five spaces, with a particular focus on Australian works. "I've aimed to put together works that reflect our city and our community," says Williams about a lineup that boasts high-profile names on- and off-stage, such as actors Hugo Weaving, Jane Turner and Yael Stone; director Neil Armfield; playwright Nakkiah Lui; and a Kate Mulvaney-written two-part adaptation of Ruth Park's iconic classic Australian trilogy, The Harp in the South novels.

Standouts include the debut of Michelle Lee's quarter-life-crisis effort Going Down, which explores the experiences of twenty-something woman in millennial Australia; and Still Point Turning: The Catherine McGregor Story, the true tale of the real-life titular figure's struggle to be herself. Weaving pops up in an all-too-timely piece about a demagogue threatening democracy, aka Bertolt Brecht's 1941 classic The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, while Stone takes on Joan of Arc in George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan. As well as helming  Black Blackie Brown: The Traditional Owner of Death, about an archaeologist's discovery of a mass grave in the Australian bush, Lui's Black is the New White is back for another run.

The list goes on, with Holding the Man and The Secret River's Armfield also delving into the country's past — and telling an indigenous tale linked to an archaeologist — in The Long Forgotten Dream, which stars actor and The Sapphires' director Wayne Blair. Elsewhere, Mad as Hell's Francis Greenslade joins forces with writer/director Sarah Giles for a new adaptation of absurdist political classic Accidental Death of an Anarchist, with their version partly inspired by Melissa McCarthy's recent satirical efforts on Saturday Night Live; The Children becomes STC's second Lucy Kirkwood-scripted effort in two seasons after this year's Chimerica; and Lethal Indifference turns playwright Anna Barnes' own experiences into a one-woman effort starring Please Like Me's Emily Barclay.