Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity is being staged at this year’s Sydney Festival by Schaubühne Berlin and Complicité director Simon McBurney.
Jamie Williams
Beware of Pity is a play based on Austrian author Stefan Zweig’s novel of the same name. It is a coming-of-age story that asks whether pity can be our undoing.
Shakira Clanton in Henrietta Baird’s The Weekend.
Jamie James/Courtesy of Moogahlin
Debates about the place of the monologue in theatre fall away when you have a show as compassionate and funny as The Weekend.
Dust is a new show by far-north Queensland company Dancenorth, currently playing at the 2019 Sydney Festival.
Pippa Samaya
Dancenorth’s Dust explores a world on the brink of turning back to dust. Its themes are familiar in contemporary dance, but the show is replete with powerful images.
A DJ provides the soundtrack of Damascus in While I Was Waiting.
Didier Nadeau
A group of diasporic Syrian actors in Marseilles came together with a few remaining in their home country to create this touching, hard-hitting play.
Kate Mulvany in An Enemy of the People.
Brett Boardman
In a new production, Ibsen’s play is transformed to small-town Australia with the whistle-blower at the centre of the story played by Kate Mulvany.
In Steven Sewell’s play, two physicists search for ‘truth’.
Kate Pardey
Stephen Sewell’s play questions truth, humanity and what constitutes our individual and collective worlds.
Performers in Circa’s En Masse.
David Kelly
The incredible physical control of the Circa acrobats, and their ability to make bodies seem weightless, is breathtaking.
Maeve Marsden and Libby Wood in Mother’s Ruin.
Brisbane Festival
This cabaret show about a beverage incorporates politics, feminism, history and some rousing singalong numbers.
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.