Sydney Theatre Company 2011 Season

SYDNEY THEATRE

The White Guard
by Mikhail Bulgakov
Adapted and directed by Andrew Upton

Set in the Ukraine, where the Russian Revolution is sweeping towards Kiev, the play follows the Turbin family as they gather in their home to prepare for the Bolsheviks' arrival. With the city in chaos, the time has come for its residents to fight or flee.

A play that has the dubious honour of being one of Stalin's favourites, The White Guard will feature the divine Miranda Otto - 2011 will be a year of great roles for women at the STC - alongside the male members of the Residents. With Wharf Revue's Jonathan Biggins and funny man-turned-straight man Darren Gilshenan also in the cast, it's a pretty good bet that the Russian Civil War will never have been as funny. (Director and Monty Python alumnus Terry Gilliam wrote that "[Bulgakov] can reduce me to tears of laughter just as I'm ready to weep in sympathy".)

After bringing the epic Long Day's Journey into Night to the Sydney Theatre, it seems Andrew Upton has developed a taste for sprawling 20th-century classics - but this one ventures outside the living room in a big way. The UK production of Upton's adaptation, directed by Howard Davies, garnered hugely positive reviews in early 2010.

The Threepenny Opera
by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill
Adapted by Raimondo Cortese (text) and Jeremy Sams (lyrics)
Directed by Richard Gill

The most notorious anti-hero to storm a stage, Macheath - or Mack The Knife as he's known on the streets - is the original city crim who's never met a law, a woman or a cop he couldn't break. That is until he challenges the supremacy of the Beggar King Peachum and his empire of manufactured woes.

Writer and critic Hans Keller called The Threepenny Opera "the weightiest possible low-brow opera for high brows and the most full-bodied high-brow musical for low brows."  Whatever position your brows might be in, Brecht and Weill's sordid, sweaty orgy of jazz, cabaret, music theatre and opera is one of the great shows of the 20th century, and this Malthouse / Victorian Opera collaborationhad them clamouring for more in its original Melbourne run. Director Michael Kantor (Optimism, Happy Days) has transplanted the story into Melbourne's ganglands - call it a Brechtian Underbelly with songs if you like (as the STC brochure encourages us to). Conducting is Richard Gill, music director of the Victorian Opera, with Paul Capsis and Shane Warne the Musical creator/star Eddie Perfect banging out the numbers, including the ol' fave ‘Mack the Knife'.

Gross und Klein (Big and Small)
by Botho Strauss
Translated by Martin Crimp
Directed By Luc Bondy

Whisking us down a rabbit hole and into a wonderland-like world, Gross und Klein (Big and Small) transports us to a hotel dining room in Morocco where Lotte sits alone. She is all dressed up with nowhere to go. There is no one to chat to. Her siesta tour group is ‘at odds' so she declines to join their excursions. She hasn't the money to pay for them anyway. For now she will sit alone, listening to the men arguing outside the window, stoically cheerful in the hope that someone, somewhere will need her help or affection.

After Shakespeare, Streetcar and Uncle Vanya, Cate Blanchett returns to the boards in Gross und Klein - a play by German playwright Botho Strauss in a new translation by Martin Crimp (The City), and one that she and Upton have been planning since their appointment to the STC in 2006. Directing is renowned Swiss opera director Luc Bondy, whose most recent claim to fame is an infamous 2009 production of Tosca at New York's Metropolitan Opera, which opened to, shall we say, strong reactions. Gross und Klein also stars Anita Hegh, Belinda McClory, a couple of STC's Residents and Sydney Theatre Awards Best Newcomer Josh McConville. The production will tour Europe in early 2012.

DRAMA THEATRE

In The Next Room, or the vibrator play
by Sarah Ruhl
Directed by Pamela Rabe

For the wife of the eminent scientist and inventor Dr Givings, the vagaries of the medical field have never held much allure. Until now.

Now, as the age of electricity dawns, her husband's profession has finally piqued her interest. But Dr Givings fails to understand his wife's sudden fascination with his practice. The remedial treatment that he administers to females suffering from hysterical disorders is an important medical invention and nothing more. The Chattanooga Vibrator is absolutely nothing for his apparently healthy, happy wife to get her bloomers in a twist about. Unable to breastfeed her baby and desperately lonely, Mrs Givings craves attention and affection. When she seeks companionship in two of the Doctor's patients, this curious young woman begins to discover the truth of what goes on behind the closed door...

After the big focus on American playwriting in 2010 (Long Day's Journey into Night, Our Town, August: Osage County, True West), In the Next Room, or the vibrator play is the sole American voice in STC's 2011 season. It's also about as contemporary as a story about the dawn of electricity can be - it debuted on Broadway in 2009. The production will be directed by Pamela Rabe, who made a terrifying Richard III in The War of the Roses but more recently directed Darren Gilshenan and Lachy Hulme in 2009's Elling. The production will feature the stimulating presence of Romper Stomper actress Jacqueline McKenzie.

Terminus
by Mark O'Rowe
Director by Mark O'Rowe

A mother is working in a suicide prevention call centre when she hears a familiar voice on the other end of the line. It's a voice that will lure her on a violent vigilante crusade.

Meanwhile, a lonely heart who has ditched her microwave dinner for one in favour of a possible romantic liaison is also being lured into danger... this time to the top of a crane. A moment of unsteadiness sends her plummeting towards certain death until an unlikely saviour catches her, stealing her heart with his gentle heroism.

Tough-as-guts Scottish playwright Mark O'Rowe wrote Crestfall, a play with a one-two-three punch of sex and violence and cruelty - it features a woman asked to fellate a dog - that saw a production in Sydney earlier this year. Terminus may to be even darker than that. Like Crestfall it is comprised of three intersecting monologues, and O'Rowe's words slip and slide and fall into rhyme like James Joyce meeting Jay-Z - but Terminus throws a supernatural quality into the mix. If you only see one play this year that features a demon made out of worms making passionate love to a woman...

Loot
by Joe Orton
Directed by Rachard Cottrell

On the day of Mrs McLeavy's funeral, Loot follows her teenage son Hal and the sexually excitable undertaker Dennis as they attempt to stash the cash from their burglary of the bank next door. When Dennis is visited by Truscott of Scotland Yard the boys realise the heat is on. Their only way out is to trust Mrs McLeavy's nurse, Fay; an ostensibly devout Catholic who, for a sizable fee, will help them shift the hot cash. Mrs McLeavy has been cold for days now... why not use her coffin?

Richard Cottrell was the director behind two of the most uproarious and silly productions to play the Drama Theatre in recent years: the fiercely funny and intelligent production of Tom Stoppard's Travesties in 2009and, before that, the madcap history of Spike Milligan and the Goons, Ying Tong: A Walk with the Goons.Loot would seem like the perfect opportunity for him to bring some zaniness to the Drama Theatre yet again - and it'll be nice to see Darren Gilshenan, popping up once again this season, flexing his own comedy muscles in a no-holds-barred satire such as this.

No Man's Land
by Harold Pinter
Directed by Michael Gow

In a smart, upper class living room, litterateur Hirst and the scruffy poet Spooner drink vodka and talk about the past. Spooner doesn't belong here. He is in Hirst's domain. When two younger men - Foster and Briggs - enter the room it becomes plain that Spooner's presence has upset the status quo. Is this Hirst's domain or theirs? And why does Spooner want to be a part of it?

It takes some serious credentials to pull off Pinter - and with its scant regard for logic and meaning, No Man's Land is definitely Pinter at his most Pinteresque. Directing for STC for the first time in over a decade is Michael Gow, writer ofAway and Toy Symphony and, until recently, long-time artistic director of Queensland Theatre Company. In the roles of Hirst and Spooner - roles written with Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud in mind - will be two veterans of the stage: Peter Carroll (currently the very model of a modern major-general in The Pirates of Penzance) and John Gaden (currently Frau Grubach, and several other characters, in The Trial).

WHARF THEATRE

ZEBRA!
by Ross Mueller
Directed by Lee Lewis

At his daughter's request, 57-year-old businessman Larry has agreed to a blind date with her fiancée. He's expecting a ‘kid' to show up. What he is not expecting is Jimmy, a 55-year-old Australian jock, who is betrothed to his precious little girl. These two self-made men are going to have to do business. Jimmy is selling and the product is himself: ‘the best son in-law in the world'.

ZEBRA! (the exclamation mark is important, we're assured) will pit two fierce Aussie talents against each other the stage: Bryan Brown and Colin Friels. It's the sign of a great script that both Brown and Friels signed up for the project before it had even seen a second draft - and, at the time of writing, the play still isn't finished. But if his recent work is anything to go by, Ross Mueller will bang out something terrific. Mueller was the twisted individual behind the fractured, fragmented 2009 play Concussion, a play populated by characters wanting to screw each other or screw over each other, with one of the more memorable soliloquies on masturbation in recent years. Lee Lewis, for her part, was the director behind three astonishing productions just this year: That Face,Twelfth Night and Honour.

As for that title, it's probably relevant to point out that, in a zebra herd, when a stallion comes to sweep a mare off her hooves, the mare's father steps in...

Baal
by Bertolt Brecht
Translated by Simon Stone and Tom Wright
Directed by Simon Stone

Gutter poet, Baal, has the literati captivated. He could be published, he could ‘be known', he could be hauled out of poverty by a legion of rich supporters. But Baal doesn't care about literary accolades. All he wants is a good meal, a clean shirt or two, and a chance to taste the ravishing wife of his would-be patron. Baal is pure pleasure principle. As Baal attempts to satisfy an insatiable appetite for pleasure, he leaves a trail of booze-drenched devastation lying in his wake.

Bertolt Brecht's first play - he wrote it when he was 20 years old - Baal is wild and raucous and full of the vitality of youth. Much the same thing could be said of director Simon Stone and his collective the Hayloft Project, who have excited Sydney audiences with the likes of The Suicide and The Only Child in the past year. Baal gets a new translation by Tom Wright and Simon Stone himself and stars Thomas Wright as the titular anti-hero.

Edward Gant's Amazing Feats of Loneliness
by Anthony Neilson
Directed by Sarah Goodes

And so begins Edward Gant's extraordinary show: a show that enacts fantastical and tragic stories of human loneliness, all the while sweetening these stinging tales with whimsical humour. But tonight is unlike any other show Gant has performed. Tonight a member of the ensemble will mutiny. Tonight the show may not go on. And after tonight it may never go on again.

Playwright Anthony Neilson wrote The Wonderful World of Dissocia, a play that begins in the colourful, delightful style of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and The Phantom Tollbooth but suddenly and shockingly turns into a play about dissociative disorder. STC gave it a fantastic production in 2009 with, in a brilliant move, Play School presenter Justine Clarke cast in the starring role. Judging by its Victorian freak show premise, Edward Gant's Amazing Feats of Loneliness will also be a jolly good time... with a dark side. Sarah Goodes has honed her skills as assistant director in STC's productions of Honour and Elling and was at the helm of a very funny and very intelligent production of the Cuban missile crisis comedy The Schelling Point at the Old Fitz.

Blood Wedding
by Federico Garcia Lorca
Translated and directed by Iain Sinclair

Blood Wedding begins with a son announcing his intention to marry. News to be celebrated by all but his mother, whose joy is smothered by a terrible feeling of fear and foreboding. His intended is good, modest and hardworking. So why does the utterance of this sweet girl's name feel like a rock in his mother's face? History pulses through the veins of the tiny rural community; the passions and blood shed in its past cannot be washed away with water. While the mother is haunted by ghosts of the past, her would be daughter-in-law is gripped by a phantom of her own. An all-consuming lust has taken possession of the girl, bringing with it the threat of humiliation, vilification and ultimately destruction.

After being partnered with STC's artists on Our Town, director Iain Sinclair brings Blood Wedding to the 2011 season as very much his own project, hoping to "take a clear-eyed view of the deep misogyny in ancient life and shine a bright light on the corners of contemporary life where ancient evils still flourish". Sinclair will be directing Leah Purcell - last onstage in Bell Shakespeare's King Lear - and the female Residents, with set design by Berlin's Rufus Didwiszus.

Bloodland
by Wayne Blair
Directed by Stephen Page
 
Outsider Cherish will be our guide through a community torn in two, divided by moiety. At the centre of the story she will tell us is a young couple: two star-crossed lovers united in their devotion but separated by blood. Theirs is a tale of social dysfunction, black on black conflict and the difficulties of observing traditional lore in a community permeated by western culture.

Bloodland reunites a couple of the busiest men on Sydney stages: writer-actor-director Wayne Blair (at the time of writing, in rehearsals for the Philip Seymour Hoffman-directed True West) and Bangarra Dance Theatre's artistic director and choreographer Stephen Page. Page and Blair will be joined by a cast of Yolgnu people in creating this new work, which will be performed in Indigenous language and Pidgin English. It will star Ursula Yovich, who played a lively Dorothy in Windmill Theatre's contemporary mash-up of The Wizard of Oz.

To buy tickets and read more about the plays of the 2011 season, visit STC.

Places to eat near Sydney Theatre Company venues

Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton - interview

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