Theatre Listings | What's On | Stage Noise

Extinction of the Learned Response by Emme Hoy

SydneyTheatre | May 7 - 25, 2019

In a spotless room, four people are having tea.

Duncan and Marlow are scientists. Rachel and Wells are their subjects, and they can almost pass for human now.

But Wells is growing stronger and Rachel is learning faster than predicted, and Duncan and Marlow’s hold on them - and on power - is proving more fragile than expected. Tensions are rising, tempers are fraying, and somewhere in the darkness, tenderness blossoms, and a carefully controlled experiment begins to twist into something far stranger, and far more obscure…

Brutal, bold and gripping, Extinction of the Learned Response asks what really makes us human. Can it taught, replicated, removed? And once you take humanity away, what’s hiding underneath?

Boy Out of the Country

SydneyTheatre | May 9 - 25, 2019

A fast and funny Australian play about family, property and the price of progress from award-winning writer Felix Nobis.

Troubled country boy Hunter returns home from the city after a mysterious seven-year absence to find the family property swept up in a regional housing estate, his mother in care, and his brother Gordon in charge. In this moment of shifting economies and loyalties Hunter goes in search of answers, but is he ready for the truth?

Boy Out of the Country is a bush ballad for contemporary regional life, written in vernacular verse reminiscent of the poetic tradition of Banjo Patterson. Here, old Australia meets new Australia – a country cop comes to terms with rapid social change, a backyard is less important than an extra bedroom, and the places that were once so familiar can change before our eyes.

Directed by Erica Lovell this newly-realised production features a stellar cast including Tom Harwood (Things Not to do After a Break Up), Jason Glover (Tidelands, Van Dieman’s Land), Jeannie Gee (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), Stan Kouros (Actors Centre Australia) and Amelia Robertson-Cuninghame (Anatomy of an Offence, Love Child).

“A play infused with the vitality of Aussie idiom and melodrama, that crackles with understatement and wit.” Cameron Woodhead, The Age

“Mr Nobis’s writing is a particular kind of brilliant… Nobis’s command of ‘vernacular verse’ is faultless” Stage Whispers

A story of land, family and belonging, Boy Out of the Country emerged from the Melbourne Theatre Company Affiliate Writers Scheme and was awarded the R. E. Ross Trust Script Development Award. The play was featured as the premiere work at the 2018 Pioneer Play Festival Castle Hill.

Cyprus Avenue

SydneyTheatre | May 15 - June 8, 2019

“Gerry Adams has disguised himself as a new-born baby and successfully infiltrated my family home.”

Eric Miller is a Belfast Loyalist. Proudly, steadfastly British. He believes his five-week old granddaughter is Irish republican Gerry Adams.

His family keep telling him to stop living in the past and fighting old battles that nobody cares about anymore, but his cultural heritage is under siege. He must act.

Traumas of the past collide with a terrifying future in David Ireland\'s brilliant new play Cyprus Avenue.

“Without prejudice we’re nothing! If we don’t discriminate, we don’t survive!”

Following acclaimed productions at the Royal Court Theatre in London and the Public Theatre in New York, the award-winning Cyprus Avenue comes to Australia for the first time. Written by playwright and actor David Ireland and staged by Empress Theatre in association with Redline Productions at the Old Fitz Theatre, Cyprus Avenue unravels the threads of sectarian violence against a darkly comic – and shocking – background.

Actor and playwright Anna Houston (Belvoir, Griffin, Bell Shakespeare) directs Roy Barker, Amanda McGregor, Branden Christine, Lloyd Allison-Young and Jude Gibson in a play that speaks to the heart of political and cultural anxieties about who and what we are in a rapidly shifting world. Wonderfully imaginative and savagely funny, Cyprus Avenue throws a grenade at the politics of identity and the madness of bigotry.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
“David Ireland’s new play combines horror and humour in bone-shaking proportions.”
The Observer (UK)

★ ★ ★ ★
“Compulsive viewing... unmissable.”
The Daily Telegraph (UK)

★ ★ ★ ★
“The most shocking play on the London stage ... a subversive drama that has never been more relevant.”
The Guardian

I Hope it's Not Raining in London

ErskinvilleTheatre | June 26 - 29, 2019

“Two people, trapped in a room. One is almost finished but the other is not yet ready. The other will be ready, but just not yet.”

In June/July this year, a team of young artists will be touring from Newcastle to Tuggerah, Sydney and Melbourne!

Sydney Season: 26th- 29th June, PACT

I Hope it’s Not Raining in London is a contemporary, hybrid-experimental theatre piece which sets out to explore our perceived realities and the effects of trauma.

Young emerging artist, Nicholas Thoroughgood, has written a sophisticated short play, which places two strangers together in a mysterious room. Neither of them has knowledge of where they are currently existing and how they got there- and the newest to arrive has no memories whatsoever. Small boxes appear sporadically- containing objects which trigger memories for them both and gradually their significant life stories are remembered and painfully explored.

Playwright: Nicholas Thoroughgood
Producer/Director: Riley McLean
Stage Manager: Tyler Atcheson
Cast: Nicholas Thoroughgood, Cassie Hamilton, Daniel Cottier and Zoe Walker.

What's On (NSW)