Through Sarah Ruhl’s distinctive voice, the story of Eurydice and Orpheus is retold from a female perspective, weaving memory, love and loss into a dreamlike theatrical experience. Melbourne Shakespeare Company presents this luminous, poetic reimagining of Greek mythology, directed by multi-award-winner Gary Abrahams, whose productions of 'Angels in America' and 'The Ghetto Cabaret' have become milestones at fortyfivedownstairs.
'Unicellular' originated from a research residency spanning Victoria and South Australia's western Wimmera and Limestone Coast, during which Kate Hunter gathered field recordings from subaquatic sites. The exhibition positions microscopic, non-human, single-cell organisms as active participants in an expanded attentional field. Drawing on the artist's theatre-making, performance, sound-design and painting practices, 'Unicellular' intersects personal stories with sounds and images that reflect the barely-visible and the easily overlooked.
This group exhibition showcases the work of 17 artists who are currently part of the Melbourne Studio School. Their pieces encompass a wide range of themes, from figuration to abstraction. The exhibition highlights various skills learnt through their training, including manual dexterity in mark-making, an understanding of compositional language, and an exploration of colour theory.
Led by Charlotte Ivey (abstract artist) and Lana Daubermann (landscape artist), these workshops are designed to inspire painters from beginners to those with more experience. This series of six fortnightly workshops can be booked individually, or as a complete set. All materials are supplied, so all you need to do is turn up (in clothing you don't mind getting paint on!), and be ready to explore.
“Windless Night” by Kate Butler centres on a collection of ceramic sculptures inspired by the stillness, light, and movement of the night sky, as well as archetypal landmarks that help individuals orient themselves in space. Represented on a smaller scale, these motifs reflect the personal process of grounding and finding one’s orientation.
A young scholar makes the discovery of the century – letters between James Joyce and comedy legend Groucho Marx – and believes she has secured her legacy. But in the cut-throat Joyce Industry, credit rarely goes to a woman. Between The Lines is a razor sharp, wryly witty literary mystery that follows her descent into a patriarchal web of ego and academic theft. As her groundbreaking discovery is hijacked by the very mentor she trusted to protect it, truth begins to blur. Packed with intellectual gymnastics and dramatic reversals, the story asks: who gets to own history? In a world of literary giants, you can’t trust even the evidence of your own eyes…
As Diana, a trans Filipina woman in Melbourne, prepares for her wedding, her plans are derailed by the death and inconvenient return of her estranged father’s ghost, endlessly singing Mr. Big’s 1991 hit To Be With You. Presented by Tayotayo Collective in association with fortyfivedownstairs, this dark comedy from award-winning writer/performer Dax Carnay-Hanrahan ('The Six Guys an Immigrant Trans Person of Colour will Date in Melbourne', La Mama) explores gender, grief, and inheritance under the direction of Beng Oh ('Soul of Possum').
In celebration of NAIDOC week, curators E Salmon and Tre Turner have asked a selection of queer Blakfulla artists based around Narrm to showcase their work. This exhibition is a coming together, celebrating eachother, the gifts they share, the gifts they receive from their ancestors, Elders and mob, and the gifts they are yet to give.
Winner of the 2025 Sydney Fringe Festival Best in Spoken Word Award, this electrifying fusion of Indian dance, music, and spoken word confronts the unspoken realities of domestic violence within families with raw honesty, cultural depth, and courage. Shaped by the voices too often left out of the conversation, 'And What Will People Say?' challenges generational silence and invites audiences into a deeply personal journey of love, fear, shame, and resilience.
fortyfivedownstairs is proud to present the eleventh Emerging Artist Award, a prestigious award and exhibition showcasing exciting talent from emerging artists.
The acclaimed musical returns to Melbourne this July-August starring music theatre luminaries Helen Dallimore ('Wicked' and 'Legally Blonde') and Deidre Rubenstein ('My Fair Lady' and 'Shakespeare in Love') as the legendary mother daughter duo, Big and Little Edith (Edie) Bouvier Beale. This new production will be directed by Tyran Parke ('Elegies: A Song Cycle' and 'Ordinary Days') and presented by Clovelly Fox and fortyfivedownstairs.
In 'Now: Embodied Expressions', eight women artists offer works shaped by years of life, practice and attention. Their art holds the textures of experience while remaining vividly present. Each work invites us into a moment where seeing and making meet.
Following multiple 2025 Green Room Award wins, local eccentrics Pummel Squad are back with a new play about shame, delusion, and the tyranny of normalcy. What starts as one man’s humiliating journey to get his nose back becomes a cacophony of tall-tales, testimonies, disputes and non-sequiturs that’ll all wrap up neatly in the end, they promise. Directed by Katy Maudlin ('Meet Me At Dawn', MTC), 'Marginalia' is a hilarious look at the feelings we push to the margins, and the foibles that are as obvious as the nose on your face.
This exhibition celebrates the long-standing friendship between artists Sal Cooper and Trudy Clutterbok, showcasing the ongoing dialogue in their respective studio practices. Both artists explore the intimate landscapes of history, love, memory, and experience.
Victoria McCaffrey's exhibition explores mark making as a form of storytelling, where every line, gesture, and trace carries emotion, memory, and intention, inviting viewers to bring their own interpretations and narratives to each work. The artist presents marks as enduring records of presence, meaning, and shared experience across time.
Passion. Politics. Power. Set against the backdrop of empire and ambition, Cleopatra & Antony's fateful romance unfolds with devastating intensity in a visceral fusion of rich language and sharp, contemporary direction from Sonya Suares ('The Lucky Country', Lawler Theatre). Melbourne Shakespeare Company follows a string of acclaimed productions at fortyfivedownstairs – 'Julius Caesar', 'Hamlet' and 'Othello' – with a gripping, modern take on one of the Bard’s great tragedies.
Barbara Rozenes' exhibition reflects a lifelong journey of caring, advocacy and devotion to family, culminating in a rediscovery of self through art. Through expressive portraits, still lifes and works in oil and watercolour, she celebrates the freedom, joy and renewal she has found in painting, capturing the stories, beauty and humanity that continue to inspire her.
'Twin' is a collaborative exhibition by twin sisters Anne Dash and Emma Dash. Working across painting, embroidery and sequinned textile, the project approaches twinhood not as duplication but as relation - shaped through closeness and exchange.
'sex death country' brings together new paintings and sculptures by Ian Bracegirdle and Ponch Hawkes.
Ian Bracegirdle is a multidisciplinary artist whose work engages with natural and geopolitical landscapes. In this exhibition, these themes evolve into the personal and singular in the form of large-scale portraits looking at friendship, masculinity and invisibility, alongside sculptural works addressing diaspora, dispossession and conflict.
Celebrated photographer Ponch Hawkes makes her first foray into painting with a new body of work centred on the symbolic figure of the bear. Inspired by the animal’s capacity for hibernation and its remarkable ability to maintain bone density and muscle mass while dormant, Hawkes explores the bear as a figure that moves between waking and dreaming worlds.
Submissions are now open for fortyfivedownstairs' sixth annual community-sourced exhibition of small works: SMALL!. Entries close Monday 9 November, 5pm.
ALL REMAINING PERFORMANCES OF BALLKIDS HAVE BEEN CANCELLED
Holly and Sam share a dream – to join the most elite squad in competitive summer sport: ballkids at the Australian Open. Funny, moving and excruciatingly human, 'Ballkids' opens with a chance encounter and jump-cuts through the next two decades of Holly and Sam’s shared life together. Following rave reviews (★★★★★ The Age) and a Green Room Award win for Best New Writing for Liv Satchell, VIMH ('The Grief Trilogy') are bringing back this smash hit of Melbourne Fringe 2024, directed by Julian Dibley-Hall ('The View From Up Here', Theatreworks).
Kate’s practice has long been focused on the symmetry and beauty of natural forms. In distilling plants and landscapes to their essence, she finds order in a disordered world. The works in 'Cosmic Forms' are meditations on order within disorder, examining our connection with all living things - from plants, to animals, to each other.
‘PRIMARY INSTINCTS’ is an annual thematic group exhibition presented by the Polish Art Foundation. In a world increasingly mediated by technology, systems, and rational frameworks, the exhibition invites artists to interpret the idea of ‘Primary Instincts’ and consider what remains immediate, embodied, and unfiltered.
Established nearly five decades ago, the Polish Art Foundation supports artists of Polish heritage in Australia while fostering artistic exchange and dialogue across Polish, Australian, and multicultural communities.
Xavier meets Sebastian in high school. They instantly hit it off, but it doesn't take long for things to get complicated. Moving through university and into the real world, Xavier fumbles through relationships and friendships, continuing to orbit Sebastian, sometimes closely, sometimes from afar. Presented by fortyfivedownstairs as part of the 2026 Fringe Festival, Margot Morales ('And She Would Stand Like This', Antipodes Theatre) directs the Melbourne premiere of Eric Jiang's funny and touching play about the unexpected forms love takes.
Robert Lee Davis' 'Community Art Card Project' returns to fortyfivedownstairs for a fourth consecutive year, offering visitors the chance to engage in collaborative art-making by using large playing cards as their canvas to create an installation in the gallery.
St Michael’s Grammar School presents 'Twelve', an exhibition celebrating the Visual Art and Design Graduates of 2026. Through the artforms of drawing, painting, photography, mixed media and design, the works showcase the breadth of creative exploration undertaken by these emerging artists and designers.
Dierdre is stuck – between friends, lovers and nations; haunted by the ghosts of the lives she almost lived. When her old school friends gather in her kitchen on Christmas Eve, their once charming differences devolve into divisive fractures, revealing a dormant powder keg tempting the tiniest of sparks. Patalog Theatre in association with fortyfivedownstairs presents the Melbourne premiere of Grace Chapple’s “remarkable debut” (Arts Hub), directed by Marni Mount ('Trophy Boys').
Perth based artist Suzanne .k. Franklin (sue.k.) returns to Melbourne with a new body of work. Further exploring her materialist positioning as an artist, the development of the work for Slivers of Time adhered to strict rules of format and composition with the motifs of a single sphere and a horizon line becoming simply devices for navigating space. Freed is the exploration and discovery of the material of the medium of Inktense Pencil.
'Slipping Sideways' explores the experiences of elderly women experiencing homelessness and the ways society overlooks those who fall outside its norms. Through the hybrid, ambiguous forms in her oil paintings, Lipmann seeks to find the extraordinary within the ordinary, embracing uncertainty, displacement and the unconventional. The exhibition also connects human vulnerability with environmental destruction through depictions of the exploited landscapes of the Pilbara.
In 1993 six artists: Jennifer Fletcher, Lisa O’Keefe, Carolyn Roberts, Chris Rowe, Jill Symes, and Dee Waterhouse, came together for the exhibition Form, Figure, Fragment, at Caulfield Arts Complex. From this meeting of minds, an enduring friendship developed and in 2013 there was a further group show. Following the passing of Dee Waterhouse, the remaining five friends have come together again for one more display of collective energy - a celebration of friendship through art.
In a new production presented by Lunatix Theatre and directed by Maeve Hook ('Never Closer'), Kenneth Lonergan’s 'This Is Our Youth' is a darkly humorous, bittersweet portrait of youth poised on the cusp of adulthood. Three privileged Upper West Side kids — drug-dealing Dennis; his dispirited, free-thinking best friend, Warren; and self-conscious fashion student Jessica — hang out, smoke pot, scheme for cash, and challenge each other. We follow them as they make tentative steps towards authentic, vulnerable connection, all in 24 hours.
This solo exhibition presents the culmination of Lea Rose’s practice-led PhD research, bringing together extensive fieldwork undertaken at Direl (Lake Tyrrell). Combining moving image, installation and archival research, the exhibition reflects the relationship between the landscape and colonial histories.
Over the past decade the Highly Strung Players have been entertaining audiences with performances of Peter Rose’s short plays. This absurdist troupe, which began appearing at fortyfivedownstairs in 2017, presents rehearsed readings with a changing ensemble. Now the Highly Strung Players return to fortyfivedownstairs with its most ambitious program yet: a two-night season of four inter-related plays.
The 16th Street Foundation and Company 16 invite you to the announcement of The Cooper Prize 2026 winner, a prestigious international $20,000 playwriting award championing bold, original theatrical voices. During the evening, excerpts from the top four finalists' new theatre works will be presented through professionally directed readings, brought to life by an ensemble of Melbourne’s finest actors, culminating in the live announcement of this year's winner.
Pummel Squad have been allowed back to fortyfivedownstairs for their fourth annual pantomime. After sold out seasons of 'Marginalia' and 'How The King Learned To Live Forever', they’re taking us on a trip to a town that time forgot. It’s 'Gidget' meets 'Jaws' meets 'ET' meets Pummel Squad, and it’s playing for four nights only. So grab your boogie boards and get down here or you'll regret it.