Author: Michael Aitkens
Director: Neil Barnett
Genre: Comedy
Agent: CONCORD THEATRICALS on behalf of Samuel French
All your favouritecharacters from the original series are reimagined for the stage, facing the challenges that come with growing old disgracefully in the era of the silver surfer.At Bayview Retirement Village, battle-axe extraordinaire Diana Trent conspires with new resident Tom Ballard to give the conniving manager his comeuppance through anhilarious plotwith unexpectedly heart-warming results.
Author: J. B. Priestley
Director: Roderick Chappel
Agent: Origin Theatrical Pty Ltd
In 1912, in the industrial north of England, the family of a prosperous factory owner are celebrating the daughter’s engagement. Their festivities are interrupted by the arrival of a police inspector, who reports the suicide death of a young woman in a local infirmary.
Are the family members correct in assuming that this tragedy has nothing to do with them? Under the inspector’s probing, a remarkable story unfolds. But is the police inspector really a police inspector?
This classic play by J.B. Priestley presents a window on society, within the framework of an intriguing mystery.
Author: Martin McDonagh
Director: Glen Barton
Genre: Comedy
Agent: Origin Theatrical
Valene and Coleman are two brothers who have lived together for years with constant petty squabbling. Now after their father’s death, and following the exhortations of the local priest, a new understanding could develop. Could, that is, if the two brothers could stop arguing over crisps, ornaments, who left the top off Valene’s pen and whose turn it is to read a magazine.
Playography. Ireland
Author: Ray Lawler
Director: Martin Gibbs
Genre: Drama
The most famous Australian play and one of the most loved, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is the tragicomic story of Roo and Barney. Beautifully observed, humorous and poignant, Ray Lawler’s much-loved play is a tale of two Queensland cane-cutters who, for 16 years, have worked up north in the brutal sugar cane fields and travelled back to Melbourne to meet up for 5 months of partying and romance with their barmaid girlfriends. AussieTheatre.com said this play is “an iconic Australian work that should remain an important part of our Australian theatre-going repertoire and cultural education.
Author: Tennessee Williams
Director: Grant Purdy
Genre: Drama
Agent: Origin Theatrical
This gorgeous, classic American play, rarely presented by community theatre, portrays a timeless story about family. The Warrandyte Theatre Company production will have a clean, yet somewhat magical set that will not detract from the series of memories being presented.
Amanda Wingfield, a faded Southern belle of middle age, shares a dingy St. Louis apartment with her son Tom, in his early 20s, and his slightly older sister, Laura. Amanda worries especially about the future of her daughter Laura, a young woman with a limp and is insecure in the outside world. Tom works in a shoe warehouse doing his best to support the family.
Amanda is obsessed with finding a suitor (or, as she puts it, a “gentleman caller”) for Laura, her daughter. Pressured by his mother to help find a caller for Laura, Tom invites Jim, an acquaintance from work, home for dinner.
The delighted Amanda spruces up the apartment, prepares a special dinner, and converses coquettishly with Jim. Laura discovers that Jim is the boy she was attracted to in high school and has often thought of since. Jim recognizes Laura’s feelings of inferiority and encourages her to think better of herself. However, Jim tells Laura that he is engaged to be married, Laura asks him to take a broken glass unicorn as a gift and he then leaves. When Amanda learns that Jim is to be married, she turns her anger upon Tom and cruelly lashes out at him.
The play concludes with Tom saying that he left home soon afterward and never returned.
Author: David Berry
Director: Loretta Bishop
Genre: Drama
Agent: Music Theatre International Australia Pty Ltd
A sensitive and gently humorous study of two elderly widowed sisters who are living together in a beach house on an island off the Maine coast, and pass their days watching whales from the porch and reconciling their complicated relationship. The older sister, Libby, has grown increasingly reclusive and irritable, as she progressively loses each of her senses and is being taken care of by her younger sister, Sarah, who feels obliged to repay the debt which was incurred when their mother died and the older sister assumed maternal responsibilities. They come to decisions, which for them are both momentous and filled with the bittersweet recognition that life, despite the alterations of time, must continue as best it can.
Author: Joan Greening
Director: Les Hart
Genre: Comedy
They say when one door closes, another door opens. Well, a truer statement could not be made about The Continental Quilt. Mike, about to settle in for the night with his present girlfriend, has his plans disrupted with the arrival of his brother, Dick. Thrown out by his wife, for showing the neighbour the new continental quilt, he’s seeking shelter, rather than going home to Mother. Both Mother and his wife, soon arrive, along with girlfriend past and future, the neighbours seeking guidance or quietness, depending on which side they come from and of course, Father, who thinks he is getting away from his wife but not knowing she is also, already there. Lies, cover ups, transformations and scheming all make this little romp some good….almost clean…fun.
Author: Joanna Murray-Smith
Director: Helen Ellis
Genre: Drama
Agent: Joanna Murray-Smith
The sharper the wits, the higher the stakes.
Somewhere in the Swiss alps, a grande dame of best-selling crime literature lives with a somewhat sinister collection of guns and knives. She finds solace in her seclusion, her cats, and cigarettes. But when a young man sent by her New York publisher to persuade her to write one final instalment of her best-selling series featuring the master manipulator, Tom Ripley, arrives on her doorstep, will her love of fictional murders becomes a dangerous reality?
SWITZERLAND is an original thriller inspired by renowned master crime novelist Patricia Highsmith by Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith (Fury, 2013). Highsmith’s books are the source of many cinematic adaptations – The Two Faces of January, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Strangers on a Train – but in SWITZERLAND the tables are turned and it is Patricia Highsmith herself who is the central character.
True to its genre, SWITZERLAND kicks off with a knock at the door and spirals into a calculated contest of wits and words.
Author: Israel Horovitz
Director: Maureen McInerney
Genre: Comedy
Agent: Origin Theatrical on Behalf of Samuel French Inc. A Concord Theatrical Company
New Yorker Mathias is middle-aged, broke and unhappy. His recently-deceased, estranged father, has left him an apartment in Paris, which Mathias intends to sell as quickly as possible. On arrival, he is surprised and bewildered to find the apartment occupied by an elderly lady and her fierce and feisty daughter. What’s more, an arcane French law decrees that they are entitled to it “en viager”: lifetime habitation!
In the course of just one week, what starts as a bitter confrontation develops into a deeply moving exploration of culture, different family values, and dignity.
Author: David Auburn
Director: Greg Shawcross
Genre: Drama
Agent: By Arrangement with ORiGiN™ Theatrical On Behalf of Samuel French A Concord Theatricals Company
On the eve of her twenty-fifth birthday, Catherine, a troubled young women, has spent years caring for her brilliant but unstable father, a famous mathematician.
Now following his death, she must deal with her own volatile emotions; the arrival of her estranged sister, Claire, and the attentions of Hal, a former student of her father’s, who hopes to find valuable work in the 103 notebooks that her father left behind.
Over the long weekend that follows, a burgeoning romance and the discovery of a mysterious notebook draw Catherine into the most difficult problem of all: How much of her father’s madness -or genius-will she inherit?
