The Trauma Project by Elizabeth Walley
An immersive composition for theatre crafted by Elizabeth Walley in response to her eyewitness experience of a homicide in her suburban street.
RUNT
A play about the runts of the world: the lesser, the unwanted, the weak, those without clout, the insignificant; all the unders.
The Anniversary
Multi award-winning creators of Die Roten Punkte, Clare Bartholomew and Daniel Tobias are back with a brand new murderously funny physical farce.
Burn This by Lanford Wilson
Two unlikely strangers are brought together by a mysterious death, their connection sparks a chemistry too explosive to ignore
Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance
Gary Abrahams directs Edward Albee’s Pulitzer Prizewinning drama of 1966 featuring a stellar cast.
The Curtain by Daniel Keene
Daniel Keene returns to fortyfivedownstairs with The Curtain, written with his sharp ear for poetry and play.
Shake ‘n’ Blake
Shake ‘n’ Blake - The Sonnets of Innocence and Experience. Blending the Good Works of Williams Shakespeare and Blake into a Lesson in Love in all its aspects.
The New Impromptu Quartet
A performance exploring a world of styles and influences from jazz to Latin, funk, and soul.
A Night of Songs and Scenes for Bushfire Relief
An evening of songs and scenes for bushfire relief.
As One
One of the major works of American opera in the 21st century has its Australian premiere as part of the 2020 Midsumma Festival.
The Age review of Punk Rock
★★★★ Cameron Woodhead Thursday 12 December 2020 Simon Stephens’ study of adolescence takes us into a Manchester grammar school, where seven students wait for their final exams. We get a fly-on-the-wall portrayal of teenagers in their natural habitat – a…
Punk Rock by Simon Stephens
From British power-house playwright, Simon Stephens, Punk Rock is a violent and urgent examination of contemporary adolescence.
The Year of Magical Thinking
Green Room Award winners Jillian Murray and Laurence Strangio re-join forces to present Joan Didion’s remarkable memoir
The Rapture Chapter II: Art vs Extinction
Moira Finucane, one of the world’s greatest performance chameleons, magic realist geniuses and apocalyptic rock goddesses, brings home The Rapture Chapter II in her mind-stunning party on the edge of the abyss.
The Age review of The Ghetto Cabaret
Cameron Woodhead August 7, 2019 — 2.11pm ★★★★ A cabaret set amid the horror and deprivation of Jewish ghettoes in World War II? You’d have to be crazy. Totally meshugah. Yet Galit Klas has created one of the most…
The Ghetto Cabaret
A powerful new cabaret featuring Yiddish songs written in the Jewish ghettos of WWII.
ABR review of A Room of One’s Own
Wednesday, 24 July 2019 Lisa Gorton ★★★★ In this intelligent and unusual play, director Peta Hanrahan arranges Virginia Woolf’s great essay A Room of One’s Own into an hour-long play for four voices. Curiously, perhaps, it works so well as…
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
Following a sold-out premiere season, Sentient Theatre's 'A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf' returns, shining a light on our history with astounding relevance to contemporary society.
The Age review of Travesties by Tom Stoppard
Monday 17 June Cameron Woodhead ★★★ Highbrow types won’t need reminding that Sunday was Bloomsday. Named after the central character in James Joyce’s Ulysses, it’s the date on which that towering monument of modernist fiction was set, and it has…
The Saturday Paper review of LOVE/SHIT
Saturday 8 June Alison Croggon Love and Shit, an exhilarating double bill by Patricia Cornelius at fortyfivedownstairs, expose the uncomfortable realities of Australia’s underclass. In doing so, these plays remind us how vital theatre can be. Sometimes, I really do…
BROKEN by Mary Anne Butler
The Victorian premiere of Mary Anne Butler’s poetic, evocative play. Winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Drama, the Northern Territory Literary Award for Best Script and the Victorian Prize for Literature.
Coral Browne: This F***ing Lady!
“Wit and charm bring Coral Browne’s fascinating life to light” - The Age
Taxithi 2: Metanastes – The Immigrants
The second instalment of Taxithi: An Australian Odyssey - a rehearsed reading and fundraiser.
Anno Zombie by Bridgette Burton
A play reading of Melbourne's first Zom-Com. The zombie apocalypse has finally come and it’s a lot more boring than anyone predicted.
TAXITHI
The untold stories of women who migrated from Greece to Australia in the 1950s and 60s.
The Australian review of The Merry Wives of Windsor
Chris Boyd The Australian April 20, 2016 Here’s a production to rescue The Merry Wives of Windsor from the remainder pile of Shakespearean history. If you know the plot at all, chances are you picked it up from Verdi’s last…
You're Tearing Me Apartment: The Roomsical
THIS SHOW IS NOT FOR THE PRUDISH SO READ ON AT YOUR OWN RISK. The Room (Movie) has become a cult staple and is regarded as the Citizen Kane of sh*[email protected] movies. YOU’RE TEARING ME APARTMENT: THE ROOMSICAL, more a…
The Melbourne Review on Vieux Carré
See article in its original context here.
Tennessee Williams is best known for a string of classic plays, such as Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie that form part of a golden thread of twentieth century American drama.
Yet it is a lesser known work of Williams’, Vieux Carré, begun in the 1930s and not completed for more than 40 years, that will feature on the Melbourne stage from next week.
Opening on January 17, ITCH productions presents the Australian premiere of Vieux Carré – an exploration of interlinking themes, as always with Williams, of sex, art, creativity, anguish and social constraints that limit that very exploration.
Forming part of Midsumma 2013, the performance opens the year for fortyfivedownstairs with a humorous and very personal work, a ‘memory play’ that follows the period of artistic, social and sexual discovery of the young American.
Theatre People rave about Vieux Carré
See the article in its original context here.
ITCH Productions presents the Australian premiere of Vieux Carré by Tennessee Williams as a Midsumma 2013 premier event at fortyfivedownstairs. It is a rich and haunting drama set in Williams’ favourite backdrop – the French Quarter of New Orleans.
This is one of Williams’ lesser known plays which he began writing in 1938 but did not complete until nearly 40 years later. It is largely autobiographical and may be described as the beginning of Williams’ exploration of self as well as his development of mood, melodrama and ‘memory play’ technique which were to become his trademark in later, more recognizable works.
Theatre Notes review: Whiteley's Incredible Blue
Review by Alison Croggon for Theatre Notes on 14 October. See here in it’s full context.
La beauté, “Beauty is difficult, Yeats” said Aubrey Beardsley
when Yeats asked why he drew horrors
or at least not Burne-Jones
and Beardsley knew he was dying and had to
make his hit quickly
Hence no more B-J in his product.
So very difficult, Yeats, beauty so difficult.
– Ezra Pound, Cantos
I left Whiteley’s Incredible Blue last night with Pound’s verse circling around my head. Barry Dickins’s new play, subtitled “an hallucination”, is almost an essay on the proposition of the difficulty and necessity of beauty, through the medium of the enfant terrible of Australian art, Brett Whiteley.
Herald Sun review: Whiteley's Incredible Blue
Review by Kate Herbert for The Herald Sun, October 14. See it in it's original context here. BRETT Whiteley, one of Australia's great painters, was a tortured artist - a self-indulgent, free spirit and heroin addict. In Barry Dickins' play,…
The Dollhouse
Nora and Torvald are cashed up and climbing: bespoke warehouse conversion, perfect children, and a shiny new job at a major bank for Torvald. Everything that Nora could want is due for Christmas. A classic play masterfully transposed to contemporary…
Burlesque Hour Loves Melbourne review and interview with Beat Magazine
Interview and review by Christina Amphlett for Beat Magazine, see it in it’s full context here.
Forget those tired old burlesque dancers swooning on stage, all dolled up in sequins and feathers galore. The Burlesque Hour brings a far more surreal experience to the table, startling and exciting audiences through a rather whacky method of seduction. Feathers and all.
The Haunting of Daniel Gartrell
Under an ochre sky something happened at Mt. Ragged. The incident inspired celebrated bush poet Daniel Gartrell’s (John Wood) most analysed piece of verse ... a poem that’s final verse has never been published. Now an enigma, Gartrell lives as…
Urban Display Suite
Urban Display Suite is a deliciously malicious musical satire on our national obsession with the property market. With Melbourne houses the most overvalued in the world, our city is awash with tandoori tanned real estate agents, tasteless architecture and boring…