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Andrew Upton Announces Line-Up for Sydney Theatre Company's 2016 Season; Rose Byrne & More Among Cast!
By: Jade Kops Sep. 03, 2015
Sydney Theatre Company's (STC) Artistic Director, Andrew Upton, has announced the 2016 season, the last of which he will program before the position is handed over to Jonathan Church at the end of 2015. Upton has said he hopes his careful selection will give Church the opportunity to get to know the company and the audiences as he oversees the 14 plays plus two special works. The offerings include works from writers Upton loves but has not covered their material in past STC programmes, actors that have been absent from STC stages for over a decade and others that are audience favourites.
The works range from classic plays, new works, stories about Australia's past, futuristic what ifs, a Yiddish myth, an exploration of contemporary prejudice, a thriller, a family friendly work with "no educational value whatsoever" and an annual favourite. The works are set to cover race, politics, sex, and power with at least one promising a liberal dose of bare flesh and a good selection being suitable for younger audiences so a night out at the theatre can be a family affair.
There are fresh interpretations of well-known works from Stoppard, Coward, Miller, Shakespeare, Feydeau, Nowra and Mamet and debuts of STC commissions from Sue Smith, Angela Betizien, Declan Greene, The Listies' Matt Kelly and Richard Higgins, Melissa Bubnic, Michele Lee, Nakkiah Lui, Hannie Rayson and Debra Thomas.
STC audience favourites Robyn Nevin, Sarah Peirse, Helen Thomson, Heather Mitchell, Ryan Coor, Genevieve Lemon and Josh McConville will be joined by the likes of Rose Byrne, Lisa McCune and John Howard who return to the STC stage after long absences.
STC's Resident Director, Helpmann Award winning Kip Williams will lead three shows and other leading directors including Neil Armfield, Simon Phillips, Rupert Goold and Sarah Goodes will also bring their vision to the works. The directors will be accompanied by many designers that STC audiences know and love.
Upton will still be involved with STC in 2016 as he directs SPEED - THE - PLOW and adapts Georges Feydeau's A FLEA IN HER EAR. Upton said:
"This, my last program for the Company, fills me with huge excitement - if a little tinged with melancholy. We have a range of fantastic classics forming the keel of our wonderful ship. Arthur Miller at last, Louis Nowra at last, Noel Coward at last. But also some new Australian works. Sue Smith is back and Angela Betzien joins us on the main stage for the first time. It's a wonderful mix of actors and writers, directors and designers, many of whom our audience will know and love. Others still that they will be thrilled to see for the first time in a long time.
"There are rumours I'm going away next year but the plays on offer are so alluring I'm not sure I'll be able to keep away. Though it is my last program, it is Jonathan Church's first, and I think inheriting and overseeing it will be an opportunity for him to get to know the Company and our audience across its full range. He'll work with some of our great writers, directors, designers and actors in work showcasing them and the STC at their best. I'm very excited for the Company as Jonathan comes in. I think he will be a great supporter of our vibrant theatre scene nationally and help keep our ship sailing internationally."
The 16 works will be staged in STC's three iconic locations, the Wharf Theatres and the Roslyn Packer Theatre at Walsh Bay and the Drama Theatre at Sydney Opera House. Melbourne and Brisbane audiences will have the opportunity to see THE SECRET RIVER as it tours. Adelaide will be treated to MACHU PICCHU as it is produced in conjunction with State Theatre Company of South Australia. DISGRACED will tour to Wollongong, Parramatta and Canberra.
2016 Season tickets are on sale from 8 September
To receive a 2016 season brochure call (02) 9250 1777
EXPLORE THE SEASON
Sydney Theatre Company presents
THE GOLDEN AGE
By Louis Nowra
14 January to 20 February 2016, Wharf 1
Opening Night: Tuesday 19 January 2016
STC Resident Director Kip Williams unearths a classic by one of Australia's foremost playwrights, Louis Nowra. THE GOLDEN AGE, written 30 years ago and set at the time of World War II, is inspired by the true story of a lost tribe of European outcasts, descended from convicts, who were 'discovered' in the Tasmanian wilderness. Since the mid-19th century this isolated community has developed a culture and dialect all their own. The play beautifully explores issues at the heart of our history; colonisation, the fragility of culture and the loss of innocence. Following defining performances in recent years in STC's ENDGAME, SWITZERLAND and FURY, Sarah Peirse features alongside a cast including Ursula Yovich, Rarriwuy Hick and Brandon McClelland.
Sydney Theatre Company and Allens present
THE SECRET RIVER
By Kate Grenville
An adaptation for the stage by Andrew Bovell
1 to 20 February 2016, Roslyn Packer Theatre
Opening Night: Friday 5 February 2016
Sold out in Sydney, Perth and Canberra in 2013, the multi award-winning stage version of Kate Grenville's novel by two of Australia's leading artists, Neil Armfield and Andrew Bovell, is regarded as one of the most significant Australian theatre works of the last decade. THE SECRET RIVER explores the conflict between transported thief William Thornhill and the Dharug people on whose land by the Hawkesbury River he attempts to settle. The play confronts the brutality which ensues and depicts a turning point in the development of Australia; a fork in the road with the chosen path resulting in consequences the country must live with today. Original cast members Nathaniel Dean and Trevor Jamieson return for strictly limited seasons in Sydney, and on tour to the Arts Centre, Melbourne and for Queensland Theatre Company to Brisbane's QPAC.
Sydney Theatre Company presents
ARCADIA
By Tom Stoppard
8 February to 2 April 2016, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House
Opening Night: Friday 12 February 2016
Widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest plays, Tom Stoppard's ARCADIA is a ravishing comedy, a literary sleuth story, a touching period romance and a scientific exposition all rolled into one. The dazzlingly conceived and constructed play interweaves two plots crosscutting time frames in two different centuries, with two sets of characters sharing one great country house. As the past intermingles with the present, Stoppard alchemises theories of Romanticism and the Enlightenment, reason and irrationality, Newtonian physics and the second law of thermodynamics - to say nothing of a number of love affairs and illicit sex. Celebrating his 50th year as a director in 2016, Richard Cottrell (whose last Stoppard was STC's 2009 hit TRAVESTIES) directs an exceptional cast including Ryan Corr, Blazey Best, Andrea Demetriades, Glenn Hazeldine and Josh McConville.
Sydney Theatre Company presents a Sydney Theatre Company and State Theatre Company of South Australia production
MACHU PICCHU
By Sue Smith
3 March to 9 April 2016, Wharf 1 Opening Night: Tuesday 8 March 2016
Lisa McCune is back at STC for the first time in a decade in MACHU PICCHU, a delicate but unflinching look at relationships, by Sue Smith. Two couples who have been friends for decades are suddenly confronted with a deeply shocking event. They must re-learn how to approach the way they live their lives. With her characteristic elegance of structure, peppered with sly humour, Smith explores the challenges of mid-life and long term relationships. This STC commission is directed by Geordie Brookman, Smith's collaborator for STC's KRYPTONITE in 2014. Also featuring Darren Gilshenan, Elena Carapetis and Annabel Matheson, the co-production with the State Theatre Company of South Australia will be seen in Adelaide following its Sydney season.
Sydney Theatre Company presents a 1927, Salzburg Festival, Théâtre de la Ville Paris & Young Vic co-production
GOLEM
Created by 1927
16 to 26 March 2016, Roslyn Packer Theatre Opening Night: Thursday 17 March 2016
The truly unique British theatre company 1927, described by London's Evening Standard as "unlike anything you will have experienced before ... officially the sexiest theatre company in town", seamlessly synchronise original live music, performance and storytelling with film and animation in Golem, a satirical take on the misuse of technology. The production is the follow up to 1927's multi-award winning, critically acclaimed The Animals and Children took to the Street, which toured to 28 countries over 3 years, and their radical reimagined hit production of The Magic Flute created with the Komische Opera which has just opened at Edinburgh Festival.
Sydney Theatre Company and Adshel present the Almeida Theatre production
KING CHARLES III
31 March to 30 April 2016, Roslyn Packer Theatre Opening Night: Saturday 2 April 2016
The Almeida Theatre production of the 2015 Olivier Award winner for Best Play, King Charles III imagines the aftermath of the death of Elizabeth II when Prince Charles finally ascends the throne. Confronting the contradictions of monarchy and democracy and exploring power and betrayal, the 'future history' play turns a Shakespearean lens on relationships in the world's most famous and exposed family. "Attendance is compulsory" pronounced the UK Telegraph's critic Dominic Cavendish, and so it proved to be for the sell-out West End season of a work described by the New Statesman as the "boldest and most provocative play about the royal family in British theatrical history". Written by one of Britain's most significant young playwrights, Mike Bartlett, directed by the great Rupert Goold and produced by London's adventurous Almeida, the Australia-exclusive season follows previous offerings by STC of the best of new international plays by those who created them, such as Steppenwolf's August: Osage County, the National Theatre's One Man, Two Guvnors and the Abbey Theatre's Terminus.
Sydney Theatre Company presents
HAY FEVER
By Noël Coward
11 April to 21 May 2016, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House
Opening Night: Friday 15 April 2016
Heather Mitchell, Helen Thomson, Genevieve Lemon, Josh McConville and Harriet Dyer are amongst the whip-smart cast who will wield the wit and illuminate the heart of Noël Coward in his classic comedy of bad manners, Hay Fever. The Bliss family are a slightly mad, bohemian lot comprised of Judith, a once celebrated stage star; her absent-minded novelist husband; their freethinking painter son and soulful fish-out-of-water daughter, Sorel. When each of them invites a potential love interest to spice up their weekend, the unsuspecting guests are in for a mind-bending, partner-swapping carnival. Having had the audience in stitches with the rollicking hijinks of 1980s suburbia in STC's After Dinner in 2015, director Imara Savage and designer Alicia Clements now adjust to the sophisticated altitude of Coward's silken society of the roaring twenties.
Sydney Theatre Company presents
DISGRACED
By Ayad Akhtar
16 April to 4 June 2016, Wharf 1 Theatre Opening Night: Thursday 21 April 2016
Under the sure hand of STC Resident Director Sarah Goodes, Ayad Akhtar's sensationally compelling Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Disgraced, receives its Australian premiere. Hotshot lawyer Amir is living the dream. He's happy, in love, and about to land a huge promotion. But to get there he's had to renounce his culture and his faith. When he and his artist wife, Emily, host an intimate dinner party, it doesn't take long for the civilised surface to crack and urbane chit chat is abandoned in a tense battle. This intelligent, thought provoking play of urgency and relevance illuminates issues of prejudice, race, religion and the sort of modern demonisation that is simultaneously shocking and unsurprising. The cast exploring this best of new international writing includes Sachin Joab, Paula Arundell, Glenn Hazeldine and Sophie Ross. Disgraced will also tour to Wollongong, Parramatta and Canberra.
Sydney Theatre Company and UBS present
ALL MY SONS
4 June to 9 July 2016, Roslyn Packer Theatre
Opening Night: Thursday 9 June 2016
Twentieth century drama would not be the same without Arthur Miller and All My Sons is one of his greatest plays. Set after the Second World War in the American wave of optimism, a dark secret - indeed the founding hypocrisy of this spirit of progress - is thrown to the surface. As elemental as a Greek tragedy, the play strips bare the Keller family and demolishes the American dream. John Howard makes his long-awaited return to STC as misguided businessman Joe Keller, alongside Robyn Nevin as matriarch Kate. STC Resident Director Kip Williams, who picked up a Helpmann this year for directing Nevin in Suddenly Last Summer, is at the helm, once again collaborating with designer Alice Babidge and lighting designer Nick Schlieper.
Sydney Theatre Company presents
THE HANGING
By Angela Betzien
28 July to 10 September 2016, Wharf 1 Opening Night: Tuesday 2 August 2016
STC's 2014 Patrick White Fellow Angela Betzien's unsettling new play, The Hanging, explores the Australian gothic motif of lost children and loss of innocence in a vast, uncompromising landscape. Three teenage girls have disappeared. When one is found and the police investigation intensifies, she has no recall of what has occurred. Her teacher is enlisted to get to the core of the girl's confusion and anxiety. It is a cat and mouse game and everyone has something to lose. STC Resident Director Sarah Goodes brings her trademark dramaturgical insight to find the truth within the play, directing a haunting, tense crime thriller featuring Ashleigh Cummings of Network Ten's Puberty Blues alongside Genevieve Lemon and Luke Carroll.
Sydney Theatre Company presents
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM
12 September to 22 October 2016, Drama Theatre,
Sydney Opera House
Opening Night: Friday 16 September 2016
Continuing his revelatory explorations of Shakespeare (Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet) STC Resident Director Kip Williams tracks the explosion of yearning and desire that is unleashed as four young people defy parental expectation and go running into the dark to pursue a different kind of future for themselves in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The sense of magic and enchantment is as heightened as ever in the forest-realm, but this is a place of liberation and exploration, of transgression, and ultimately transformation for the quarrelsome quartet of lovers. Williams investigates the Dream as a story of sexual awakening to reveal a comedy as complex and detailed as any tragedy. Robert Collins (The Lion King) and Honey Debelle (ABC TV's Carlotta) make their STC debuts.
Sydney Theatre Company presents
POWER PLAYS
Five new short plays by Melissa Bubnic, Michele Lee, Nakkiah Lui, Hannie Rayson and Debra Thomas
17 September to 15 October 2016, Wharf 2
Opening Night: Thursday 22 September 2016
Power Plays, by a quintet of Australia's finest playwrights, is a collection of five 20-minute plays relating in diverse ways to the role and function of control in people's lives. Who really has clout and how does authority affect identity, survival, love, hate and sex? Melissa Bubnic, Michele Lee, Nakkiah Lui, Hannie Rayson and Debra Thomas each have a knack for the political and a gift for the comedic. STC's current Richard Wherrett Fellow, director Paige Rattray (Boys will be boys) will be at the helm, with David Fleischer (Love and Information), Ross Graham (Boys will be boys) and Steve Toulmin (Little Mercy) creating set, costumes, light and sound.
Sydney Theatre Company presents
A FLEA IN HER EAR
In a new adaptation by Andrew Upton
31 October to 17 December 2016, Drama Theatre,
Sydney Opera House
Opening Night: Friday 4 November 2016
Andrew Upton's new adaptation of the notorious French farce A Flea in Her Ear by Georges Feydeau will be realised in all its clockwork-precision glory by the dream team behind STC's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: director Simon Phillips, designer Gabriela Tylesova and lighting designer Nick Schlieper. When Raymonde suspects her husband Victor of having an affair, she lays the perfect trap to catch him with his pants down at a seedy hotel. But her scheme spectacularly goes awry in a vertiginous romp of mistaken identity, misplaced honour and mischievous doubling; the spiral of chaos all initiated by Feydeau but escalated by Upton.
Sydney Theatre Company and Colonial First State Global Asset Management present
SPEED-THE-PLOW
By David Mamet
8 November to 10 December 2016, Roslyn Packer Theatre
Opening Night: Saturday 12 November 2016
Rose Byrne (back at STC for the first time since 2001) and Lachy Hulme are confirmed for David Mamet's excoriating satire on the ruthless nature of Hollywood and the movie industry, Speed-the-Plow, directed by Andrew Upton. A studio head honcho is faced with a life-changing decision. Should he make his best friend's formulaic, mindless prison film - a likely commercial hit sure to impress the top brass? Or will he be swayed by his enigmatic temporary secretary, Karen, who is gunning for an arty adaptation of an apocalyptic, spiritual novel? She might just save his soul. Or does she have other ambitions? A master at hucksters and sharks - and there may well be a few of those in Hollywood - Mamet's tight, hilarious and unflinching dialogue ensures the stakes are always high in this late-20th-century modern morality play.
SPECIAL SEASON OFFERS
Two other shows complete STC's offerings of 2016
Sydney Theatre Company presents
THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET: PRINCE OF SKIDMARK
A Badaptation of the Bard
By The Listies
16 June to 17 July 2016, Wharf 1 Theatre Opening Night: Sunday 19 June 2016
For its family show this year STC brings together children's favourites The Listies, who according to The Guardian "know all the right buttons to push to make children shriek with laughter", and playwright and director Declan Greene of Sisters Grimm (Calpurnia Descending, Little Mercy) who knows a thing or two about eliciting a similar response from adults. Hamlet: Prince of Skidmark is a very comic, somewhat scatological retelling of Hamlet: an aBUMdance of bodily fluid jokes and outright anarchy to hook in theatre first-timers, while the more experienced theatre-goers can delight in a satirical riff on one of the best-known plays in the canon.
Sydney Theatre Company presents
THE WHARF REVUE
Written and created by Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe and Phillip Scott
19 October to 23 December 2016, Wharf 1
Opening Night: Thursday 20 October 2016
They sing, they dance, they wear funny hats. Paul Keating once said that politicians come in three varieties: straight men, fixers and maddies. Well, you can be sure all of them will be knocked down a peg or two when The Wharf Revue comes rolling back into town. From the inimitable minds of Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe and Phillip Scott comes another instalment of what has become a true Sydney institution. From the movers to the shakers, from the winners to the losers, the stage will be filled with a year's worth of foolishness. And if there's one thing that a federal election year brings, it's a smorgasbord of satirical goodies.
2016 Season Tickets are on sale from 8 September
To receive a 2016 season brochure call (02) 9250 1777
EXPLORE THE SEASON
#STC2016
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