Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel is brought to the stage by Christopher Sergel. The story of Jean Louise Finch, who shares her memories of growing up in Maycomb, Alabama during the summer of 1935. Known as “Scout” as a young girl, the nine-year old’s world is turned upside down when her widowed father, lawyer Atticus Finch, defends a young black man accused of raping a white woman.
As tensions erupt and neighbours take sides in the life-and-death case, it is Scout’s clear-eyed courage in the face of ignorance and bigotry that ultimately brings hope to a damaged community.
VDL Awards Entries 2024
Current VDL Awards year: 2024.
To Kill a Mockingbird
Peridot Theatre Inc
10 May 2024 - 19 May 2024
Steel Magnolias
Beaumaris Theatre Inc.
10 May 2024 - 25 May 2024
A beautiful, bittersweet human comedy set in America’s deep-south, it’s the story of six very special friends bonded together by their mutual triumphs and tragedies.
Despite their differences, beautiful and impulsive Shelby, her strong-willed mother, M’Lynn, beauty parlour owner Truvy, elegant widow Clairee, sharp-tongued Ouiser and mousy newcomer Annelle enjoy a friendship that spans the boundaries of age and status. Sharing each other’s strength and loyalty, these six remarkable women survive the cycles of life, birth, death and marriage to emerge stronger, closer and still laughing.
The funniest story to ever make you cry…
Oedipus The King
Smart Artz Theatre Inc.
30 May 2024 - 2 Jun 2024
SOME TRUTHS ARE BETTER LEFT UNKNOWN…
In a city gripped by chaos, the hunt for an elusive murderer begins.
Enter Oedipus, a charismatic leader navigating a web of political intrigue.
While unravelling the murder mystery and his own past, Oedipus becomes entangled in a high-stakes thriller, where every revelation builds to a shocking conclusion.
Smart Artz Theatre Inc presents Sophocles’ tragedy as a modern day political thriller, where one man’s determination to find the truth brings about his own downfall.
The Effect
Torquay Theatre Troupe Inc.
6 Jun 2024 - 16 Jun 2024
‘The Effect’ is a clinical romance. Two young volunteers, Tristan and Connie, agree to take part in a clinical drug trial. Succumbing to the gravitational pull of attraction and love, however, Tristan and Connie manage to throw the trial off-course, much to the frustration of the clinicians involved. This funny, moving and perhaps surprisingly human play explores questions of sanity, neurology and the limits of medicine, alongside ideas of fate, loyalty and the inevitability of physical attraction.
The Skin Of Our Teeth
Essendon Theatre Co.
13 Jun 2024 - 22 Jun 2024
Meet George and Maggie Antrobus of Excelsior, New Jersey, a suburban, commuter-town couple (married for 5,000 years), who bear more than a casual resemblance to that first husband and wife, Adam and Eve: the two Antrobus children, Gladys (perfect in every way, of course) and Henry (who likes to throw rocks and was formerly known as Cain); and their garrulous maid, Sabina (the eternal seductress), who takes it upon herself to break out of character and interrupt the course of the drama at every opportunity (“I don’t understand a word of this play!”). Whether he is inventing the alphabet or merely saving the world from apocalypse, George and his redoubtable family somehow manage to survive — by the skin of their teeth.
Completed by the author less than a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1971, The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) broke from established theatrical conventions and walked off with the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Combining farce, burlesque, and satire, and elements of the comic strip, Thornton Wilder depicts an Everyman Family as it narrowly escapes one end-of-the-world disaster after another, from the Ice Age to flood to war.
Gaslight
Cathouse Players Inc
14 Jun 2024 - 23 Jun 2024
Jack Manningham has been relentlessly undermining and manipulating his wife Bella, to the extent that she begins to doubt her own sanity, and that she is mad, as Manningham insists. Alone, and in utter despair, in a room lit only by gaslight, Bella receives an unexpected visitor, a former police detective, named Rough. He listens attentively as she finds the courage to confide in him, then to her utter astonishment, reveals the reason for his presence.
Lovesong
Malvern Theatre Co. Inc.
21 Jun 2024 - 6 Jul 2024
William and Margaret will share forty years of marriage, with moments of joy, but also much sadness. In this poignant and moving play we see them in both their optimistic and joyful younger years, as well as in their latter years, as they experience both happy memories and regrets.
BAFTA awardee Abi Morgan has created a play touching on “magical realism” as ‘Bill’ and ‘Maggie’ intertwine poetically and musically with their younger selves in the home and garden in which they have always lived. British Theatre Guide described Lovesong as “A really beautiful, tender work … an unforgettable, elegiac drama”. This will be the premiere, non-professional staging of this very special play.
Misery
Geelong Repertory Theatre Co. Inc.
28 Jun 2024 - 13 Jul 2024
Famed writer Paul Sheldon is ready to leave his popular series of romance novels featuring Misery Chastain behind in pursuit of work that offers more critical recognition. That is until he is involved in a horrific car accident during a snowstorm in Colorado. Upon regaining consciousness he finds himself in a remote cabin being nursed back to health by his self-proclaimed number one fan, Annie Wilkes.
Based on the bestseller by Stephen King (The Stand, Rita Hayworth And Shawshank Redemption) and adapted for the stage by Academy Award winner William Goldman (All The President’s Men, The Princess Bride), ‘Misery’ takes its audience on a harrowing journey through the depths of a writer’s worst nightmare.
By arrangement with Music Theatre International Australasia Pty Ltd, on behalf of Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
Admissions
Brighton Theatre Company
16 Aug 2024 - 31 Aug 2024
Admissions is a scorching satire that holds a mirror up to privilege and power through the lens of the education system. It is both deliberately provocative and caustically funny as it takes a subversive side-swipe at hypocritical good intentions.
Sherri Rosen-Mason is head of admissions at an exclusive Prep school in New England; her husband Bill is the principal. They are passionately committed to increasing the number of students at the school from culturally and linguistically varied backgrounds, and they’re starting to see results. But when their only son sets his sights on an Ivy League university, personal ambition collides with progressive values, with powerful results. A no-holds-barred look at privilege, power, and the perils of hypocrisy. Admissions is a biting comedy that asks audiences to question just how far they are willing to go to see the change they want in the world.
Jasper Jones
The Mount Players
16 Aug 2024 - 1 Sep 2024
Jasper Jones is based on Craig Silvey’s celebrated novel, with the stage adaptation by the award-winning Kate Mulvany. This is a heart-warming and coming-of-age story, set in a small Australian town in the sixties. It centres on the lonely and bored Charlie, a lover of books, whose world is changed forever when fellow outsider Jasper Jones knocks on his window to solve a murder. Known as the town scapegoat because of his dark skin, Jasper knows he’ll be the first suspect and draws in Charlie into a race against time to get to the bottom of the mystery.
Note: This production contains coarse language, adult themes and references to violence and sexual abuse, and depictions of suicide that may be triggering to some audience members.