There are things Ben Grant never knew about his parents, including the tenderness they struggled to express. Discovered after their deaths, their letters form the basis of this disarmingly funny exploration of family, grief and the peculiar intimacy of reading words never intended for you.
Age is no excuse for behaving yourself. With ridiculous costumes, unruly dancing and a few uncomfortable truths about growing older, Prime Time takes a playful swipe at the generation gap. Beneath the silliness, there's a surprisingly tender provocation: what if we stop counting?
There are giant eyeballs, a singing mop and enough Kate Bush to satisfy the Fish People. But Sarah-Louise Young’s cleverest trick is making a roomful of strangers feel, for an evening, like they belong to one another.
God, death, shame, desire and the appalling inconvenience of other people. Hitherto turns the existential crisis into a gloriously funny theatrical playground, where meaning is always just within reach — until someone starts meowing.
Irene Holub’s Manifesto of Silences is an exhilarating reimagining of opera, where signing bodies, shifting images and vibrations beneath the seats create a work of extraordinary beauty, anguish and tenderness.
Emma Fawcett’s Toto’s Song is a glorious, irreverent and deeply moving portrait of a woman determined to live and die on her own terms. With magnificent performances and exceptional direction from Kate Fryer, this La Mama production is among the finest theatre of the year.
Ngioka Bunda-Heath’s Estuary is a beautiful, unsettling exploration of bodies, belonging, water and Country. Through recurring movement, the deep thrum of its soundscape and a landscape contracting around its dancers, the work gathers a disquieting force, while its images linger.
He likes things just so. She has other ideas. The Portrait finds glorious, somewhat cathartic physical comedy in the oh-so-recognisable rules, rituals and petty irritations of working life.
For all its fury about governments, institutions and wealthy benefactors, Fuck Your Funding keeps turning its attention back onto the artists themselves. Hamilton allows each person inside the argument enough humanity to become inconvenient. The result is messy, funny, fiercely intelligent theatre.
Soil passes from hand to hand. Scent settles differently on each wrist. Luke Casserly’s Distillation makes an Irish bog sensuously present, while quietly opening questions about land, memory and place.
Funny, tender and beautifully performed, Rhomboid explores the messy space between friendship and romantic love, and the limits of the language we use to describe how we feel about one another.
Funny, furious and unexpectedly moving, Exhibit turns the act of looking into its theatrical playground, poking at the gap between being looked at and being seen — and what happens when other people’s eyes begin to shape your own sense of self.
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Gregory Nussen’s extraordinary QFWFQ tumbles through Calvino, queerness, Jewishness, family and Palestine. Funny, formally audacious and achingly tender, it turns the unfinished story into something profoundly alive.
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Janice Muller’s Waiting for Godot is superbly performed: funny, affecting and completely absorbing. Tim Heath and Gus Read-Hill are glorious as Vladimir and Estragon, while Tim Rogers and Luke Lennox bring comic extravagance, menace and astonishing force to Beckett’s strange world.
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Lewis Major’s Triptych starves its audience of light, transforming bodies into fragments, images and traces. The result is technically astounding, exquisitely beautiful and completely hypnotic.
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Wright’s Lord of the Flies is a thrillingly accomplished production, going beyond modernising a familiar text: it unsettles the assumptions through which we understand it. What if the island experiment shows us a reproduction of the hierarchies and violence of the world they supposedly left behind?
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Angus Cameron’s LUKE is a sharp, slippery new work about memory, intimacy and the cultural narratives that gather at the blurred edges of harm. Under Iain Sinclair’s direction, Red Stitch gives the play an exhilaratingly assured premiere — bold, restless and deeply provocative.
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Tender, sensuous, and exquisitely attuned to the elemental, 7 Dances for 7 People dissolves the boundary between bodies and their environment. Seven dancers gather and disperse through haze, sound and light, loosening something in my own body as they go.
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Tender, searching and remarkably generous, The Return reaches for the humanity that generations of fear and violence so often obscures. Ala’a Al Qaisi’s courageous appeal to find our way beyond them and towards one another is, in a word, extraordinary.
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Funny, strange and technically thrilling, Behind the Veil builds a richly theatrical world around the extraordinary skills of NICA’s emerging circus artists.
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Exceptional physical comedy opens into a spiritual reckoning in Holy Fool — a wildly funny, profoundly moving and utterly sublime piece of theatre, exquisitely directed by Giovanni Fusetti and performed by Fabio Motta with breathtaking skill, generosity and soul.
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A beautifully nuanced and superbly realised new Australian play, The Memory Mirror reveals its layers with exquisite control. Georgina Luck’s writing, Drew Tingwell’s direction and a stellar ensemble create theatre that is at once playful, mysterious and profoundly affecting.
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In How to Eat Rabbit, two friends burrow away at the end of the world, rationing power, sorting tins, craving chocolate and trying to keep each other alive. Between tenderness, betrayal and a two-headed rabbit, survival is one problem. What makes survival worthwhile is another.
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Moving from lockdown balconies to sibling rivalry, boardroom manoeuvring and an impossible bargain, Edge of the Heart Productions’ four-play collection finds humour, tension and simmering unease in the textures of ordinary lives.