Gary Cooper as Uncle Harvey in Skylab. He offers a powerful performance as a man consumed by anger concerning the past treatment of his people.
Dana Weeks
In 1979, the American satellite Skylab crashed in Western Australia. A new play imagines what happened to an Aboriginal family nearby.
Wayne Blair as Jeremy and Jada Alberts as Simone in Sydney Theatre Company’s Production of The Long Forgotten Dream.
© Heidrun Lohr
In the Sydney Theatre Company’s premiere production, white guilt festers as part of the shame, the ongoing, percolating wound that is the plot-space of contemporary colonisation.
Tania Vukicevic as ‘Feminist AF’ Lysa in Lysa and the Freeborn Dames.
Dylan Evans Photography
In La Boite’s premiere production, 19-year-old Lysa unleashes a one-woman protest inspired by recent women’s marches around the world.
Eryn Jean Norvill as Justine in Melancholia: the play echoes and resonates with details of its cinematic predecessor.
Pia Johnson
A successful adaption of Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia breathes new life and energy into its female characters.
Melita Jurisic as the mother who confines her four daughters to their house for eight weeks of mourning.
Jeff Busby
Federico Garcia Lorca’s shocking civil war play is successfully transferred to the Australian desert by the Melbourne Theatre Company.
Annabel Matheson as Liddy in Terrestrial.
Kate Pardey.
In Terrestrial, teenager Libby wants aliens to whisk her across the galaxy to escape her abusive father.
Archaeologist Dr Jacqueline Black (Megan Wilding) becomes the superhero Blackie Blakie Brown.
© Daniel Boud
Nakiah Lui’s Blackie Blackie Brown is an explosive collision of genres that executes Indigenous justice with extreme prejudice.
Josh Price, Catherine Davies and Jenny Wu in Sydney Theatre Company and Malthouse Theatre Company’s Production of Going Down.
© Brett Boardman
Michele Lee’s play is a vibrant and layered comic exploration of stereotypes, from piccolo-quaffing urban Melburnites to migrant memoirists.
Ashley Lyons and Heather Mitchell as Cate McGregor pre- and post-transition in Still Point Turning.
© Philip Erbacher
Still Point Turning highlights the stigma and controversy around Australia’s most high-profile transgender person.
The Great War uses scale models to depict catastrophe through a keyhole.
Tony Lewis
The Great War uses scale models to give a worm’s eye view of titanic violence. In Kings of War, by contrast, lethal events are viewed from the unsteady perspective of leaders.
Helen Morse lends her voice to the poetry of Memorial.
Shane Reid
Memorial brings Alice Oswald’s poetic retelling of the Iliad to the stage, with its furious indictment of war and its aftermath.
Julia Hales and the cast of You Know We Belong Together.
Toni Wilkinson
You Know We Belong Together is a moving demand for more representation of people with Down Syndrome in the arts.
Rachel Burke as Olivia (left), Miranda Daughtry as Annie (centre) and Anna Steen as Ruby in In The Club.
Sia Duff
A new work by playwright Patricia Cornelius tackles the prevalence of sexual assault in Australia’s sports culture. In The Club is engaging, poetic and relevant to our times.
French-Canadian actor Yves Jacques in Robert Lepage’s The Far Side of the Moon.
Toni Wilkinson
This Perth Festival show, soon to come to Adelaide, contemplates both the mysteries of the cosmos and one man’s inner life.
Evgeny Grishkovets in Farewell to Paper: a meditation on times past, the fears raised by the dizzying turnover of technologies and the importance of patience.
Toni Wilkinson
A engaging show at the Perth Festival is an homage to obsolete objects - pen knives, blotting paper, inkwells, the handwritten letter, telegrams - and a meditation on time.
Julie Hale (left) and Joshua Jenkins in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, an adaptation of Mark Haddon’s novel.
Brinkhoff/Mögenburg.
A theatre production of Mark Haddon’s much-loved novel is affirmative and at times deeply sentimental, with a hi-tech set, and exacting choreography.
Bani and the cast of My Name is Jimi.
Daniel Boud
My Name is Jimi is the story of actor Jimi Bani told by four generations, in three languages, drawing on multiple cultural and theatrical traditions.
Maura Tierney (second from left) plays Germaine Greer, Scott Shepherd (far left) and Ari Fliakos (second from right) both play Norman Mailer, and Greg Mehrten as Diana Shilling (far right).
Prudence Upton
The Town Hall Affair is a recreation of a 1971 debate between Germaine Greer and other feminists and Norman Mailer. It feels exceptionally prescient in 2018.
Elaine Cromby and Ursula Yovich in Barbara and the Camp Dogs.
Brett Boardman
Barbara and the Camp Dogs transformed Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre into a pub gig. But what started as a comedy became a searing tragedy about Australia’s inability to listen to Indigenous people.
Hilary Cole, Helen Dallimore and Maggie McKenna in Sydney Theatre Company and Global Creatures Production of Muriel’s Wedding the Musical.
© Lisa Tomasetti
Muriel Heslop stole Australia’s heart when she debuted on screen in 1994. Now she gets a loving, ABBA-filled musical tribute, that is definitely not terrible.