Broadsheet headlines that make us reel today may well line the kitty-litter tomorrow, but what does it mean to have satellite bulletins passing through us as inescapably as the air we breathe? When we’ve switched off the TV, does the scramble of information still lodge itself somewhere deep inside us? Lucy Guerin confronts a daily reality saturated with the unceasing transmission of news. Created with an outstanding ensemble of dancers and collaborators, including a design by Gideon Obarzanek (Mortal Engine) with lighting by Paul Jackson (Elizabeth, The Tell-Tale Heart), Human Interest Story has been commissioned by Malthouse Theatre in partnership with Lucy Guerin Inc and the Perth International Arts Festival.

“Guerin has a unique capacity to illuminate deep human emotions through abstract choreography” – The Age (Structure and Sadness)

As Sappho herself reminds us: all education is a form of seduction. Your lesson begins now. 2700 years ago, Sappho is the world’s first love poet, the tenth muse of the ancient Greeks, and the inspiration for every lovelorn writer and songster since. But history catches up with her, and over time, Sappho becomes just a gap to be filled with the lusts and desires of each new generation...

Sappho...in 9 fragments is a roller-coaster, tour de force through two and a half millennia of Sappho’s story, weaving together the strange tale of her fragmented reception with a contemporary love story in her own words.

As a timeless Sappho relives her uses and abuses through history, in the modern world a heart-broken young woman tries to piece together the fragments of her sexual awakening.

If you are new to VCE Drama this is a wonderful workshop for those who need inspiration and ideas to assist their students in approaching the Mini-Solo and the more challenging Solo Performance Exam. Participants will work on the floor using non-naturalistic theatre making techniques across a range of stimuli. Getting inside the task itself is the basis for this full day workshop.

Josef K is in trouble with a capital T. He’s been accused of something and no one will tell him exactly what.

Despite his adamant protestations of innocence, K finds himself swept up on an inexorable tide of bureaucracy, dragged adrift by strange forces that are invisible, threatening and unstoppable. He knows that the law court is intent on punishing guilt but just what ‘guilt’ is, is growing ever more ambiguous. Slowly, gradually, K’s composed demeanour is eroded and – as the world around him becomes increasingly nightmarish, reality slips from his grasp.

The power of Franz Kafka’s writing explodes on stage in this new adaptation by Louise Fox (Elizabeth) with Matthew Lutton, the writer/director team of Malthouse Theatre's smash hit Tartuffe, with an all-star cast including John Gaden, Ewen Leslie and Belinda McClory (pictured).

Theatre Studies Unit 4

Performing a monologue is exciting yet challenging. These seminar/workshops assist students in approaching text, making interpretive decisions, playing with ideas on the floor, and experiencing monologues in performance. Throughout the day students will play the role of audience, director and performer.

If you mess with the Ancient Greeks, beware a little blood.

In the charnel house of Greek legend one room is forever reserved for that most ferocious of tales – that of Thyestes, the deposed king whose sons were slaughtered and served as a feast to their unwitting father. Fratricide, adultery, incest and exile: this is the family feud which begets all others.

The Hayloft Project's Simon Stone has set upon Seneca's 2000-year-old play with relish, enlisting the alchemical talents of Black Lung Theatre's Thomas Henning and Mark Winter, and the divine voice of Chris Ryan (Elizabeth), to rediscover what makes Thyestes one of the most terrifying of all stories - a tragedy without salvation, a plea that falls on deaf ears. In an ever-escalating and senseless cycle of retribution without redemption, and abandoned by the gods, our only hells are those of our own making. Happy feasting!

Intimacy is born in the strangest of places.

Our friends reflect who we want to be; our acquaintances who we might become; our family what has made us. But only a stranger can reveal who we really are.

Intimacy begins with a man stepping out of his apartment into the chaos of a busy night. His aim: nothing more than to speak to strangers, to meet new people, to flirt with the simple differences any urban street may throw up. The result: an evening of human connection between people whose collision is as profound as its happenstance.

Ranters Theatre is a Melbourne based ensemble whose production, Holiday, a hypereal two-hander, enjoyed a season of sold-out performances for Malthouse Theatre in 2008. As a result, in partnership with Melbourne International Arts Festival, Malthouse Theatre has commissioned Ranters to create Intimacy, an extension of that unique theatrical vision exploring what the most humble of interactions can reveal to us.

A New Malthouse theatre Education Commission for Years 9 & 10

Happiness is an episodic theatre work commissioned around the diverse themes of Climate Change, for an ensemble of four actors.

Malthouse Theatre have conceived this initiative for Year 9 and 10 students across Semester Two: the in-school component in Term Three followed by the in theatre component in Term Four. The project will actively engage your students in the creation of a new theatre production, enabling each student deep involvement with conception and creation of a theatre piece, linking directly to several areas of the curriculum; including VELS Level 6 and towards VCE Unit 3 Drama and Theatre Studies.

Happiness is an episodic theatre work commissioned around the diverse themes of Climate Change, for an ensemble of four actors. Like the best theatre, the themes in Happiness do not point to a single position but prompt a series of questions, propositions and provocations for both the theatre-makers and the theatre audience

What is this world we live in?
Where do we see our future?
What is the world we want to live in?

The script, Happiness, is approximately 45 minutes in total consisting of numerous stand-alone episodes of 10 - 12 minutes, and intentionally developed to explore a variety of performance styles, theatrical conventions and dramatic elements. These will include: disjointed time sequences, pathos, heightened use of language, shifting perspectives, and the transformation of object/ character etc.

Early in Semester Two, teachers will be given a comprehensive stimulus pack including objects and reference images for the students, to provoke thought, risk-taking and the material’s potential for drama. In Term Three the schools involved will receive the script, and access information through a specially created blog conceived to assist participants in making partnerships, creating a space for discussion, and bringing together participating schools throughout the semester.

Each student group will select ONE of the short episodes from the script with the view to creating their own 10 minute interpretation through performance, including: dramaturgy, direction, design, set-up and striking any props/set. This selected excerpt will be rehearsed prior to performing their interpretation in the Tower Theatre at The C.U.B. Malthouse to their peers and professional arts practitioners.

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To register, or for more information on Happiness, please email Fiona James, Education Program Manager on education@malthousetheatre.com.au or call on 9685 5165.
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Trust no one, not even your own shadow!

Two years ago, 1927, one of the UK’s most original and innovative theatre companies, bewitched Malthouse Theatre audiences with their international sensation, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.

In partnership with the British Council and Sydney Opera House, the group return with their newest work, an even more enigmatic tale of dubious characters inhabiting a world where the wolf is always at the door.

Through a fractal looking glass we find ourselves in a dystopian metropolis of living objects and transforming people, where an ever-present Beast is causing fear to ripple throughout the city. Seamlessly synchronizing live music, performance and storytelling with stunning film and animation, The Animals and Children Took to the Streets, is a wickedly funny and twisted tale from this multi-award winning company.

As the Red Army rolls into Berlin, an unnamed woman waits for the inevitable. The conquest of the city is only the beginning of a new war, one in which the vanquished will be claimed by the victors…

Hailed as one of the most powerful and important accounts of a woman’s experience of war, A Woman in Berlin has only gained in its ability to shock and impress itself more than half a century later. The voice of this anonymous, brilliant account slips between pitiless honesty and lyrical elegance, all the while daring to stare its unthinkable subject in the eye.

'Poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric', wrote Theodor Adorno – but beneath the brutal detail of this fearless narrative lies a mythic lament to the women who have been silenced by history. Orpheus has left his Eurydice to an eternity in the underworld; her crime to have looked back at the trials she endured there. In this clear-eyed account of her own history, the forgotten woman's lament is finally given voice.
 

A man - a murderer - sits alone upon a staircase, pursued by shadows, weeping darkness and throwing up demons. If at first he seems a mass of neuroses, his tics and spasms, the symptoms of a terrible guilt, soon enough he is revealed as the dark soul of our age and, eventually, of the state of a theatre, trembling on the edge of obsession and madness.

The Tell-Tale Heart is based on the classic short story by Edgar Allan Poe, a writer whose legacy haunts the shelves of our greatest modern literature. He is credited with the creation of the detective genre, but is better known for his macabre tales of murder and grisly retribution.

In 2007 Barrie Kosky created a thrilling voyage into the morbid and fascinating world of the 'Master of Horror' with Austrian actor, and angelic singer, Martin Niedermair. In November, the chilling work will be re-staged with Niedermair and, multi-award winning Australian pianist, Michael Kieran Harvey as the final production in Michael Kantor’s artistic programming for Malthouse Theatre.