The VCE Summer School is suitable for students entering year 11 or 12 VCE Drama and/or Theatre Studies in 2011.

This course has been specifically designed to focus on preparing students for VCE Drama and Theatre Studies. Adopting a practical approach, participants will work with two teaching artists to explore techniques for creating non-naturalistic ensemble and solo performances, text-based monologues and analysing live theatre performance.

Working in MTC’s rehearsal studio, students will be introduced to a range of playmaking, rehearsal, development and dramaturgical techniques that address devised and scripted works, and also explore elements of production and design for the theatre. These processes will guide their preparation for VCE Drama and Theatre Studies Unit 4 coursework and assessment tasks.

The group will attend a matinee performance of STC’s production The Wharf Revue: Not Quite Out of the Woods, written and created by Jonathon Biggins, Drew Forsythe and Phillip Scott, at 1pm on Wednesday 12 January 2011, at the MTC Theatre, Sumner. This production will be used as the basis for exploring performance analysis, and to inform their own creative work and knowledge in non-naturalism, stagecraft, and theatrical styles.

The teaching artists will be Meg Upton and Emily Taylor. This course is limited to 26 participants, so book in early to secure your place!

Image: Amanda Bishop and Jonathan Biggins in Sydney Theatre Company’s The Wharf Revue: Not Quite Out of the Woods. Photo by Tracey Schramm.

Australian Premiere

Long ago, when he was a young man, Carmichael had something snatched from him. For getting on thirty years now, he’s searched for it, as the turning world rubbed against him and his resolve calloused into obsession. His quest leads to a dingy motel room, where Toby and Marilyn, two desperate chancers, claim they have got what he’s looking for. But woe will follow wrath if the merchandise isn’t genuine.

‘You’ll spend 90 minutes laughing nonstop’
The Wall Street Journal

'Wildly entertaining'
New York Daily News

'Irresistible ... as unexpected as it is funny'
The Telegraph

See the Theatre Notes review by Alison Croggon

Australian Premiere

Eminent art historian Kristin Miller has had a firebrand life. Radicalised early, she took to the streets of Paris in ’68 and just kept storming through the years, not losing a degree of her leftist fervour. Characteristically, she holds back nothing in her best-selling autobiography – except the inconvenient fact that she has two children. On her birthday the sons arrive for dinner armed with their own versions of her story.
 

'Raw and very funny'
The Evening Standard

'Sharp, satirical and poignant drama'
The Independent

Dr Givings is a coolly rational man of science, whose modern method for treating hysteria has many advocates – not least the female patients themselves, who come back wanting more.

Hearing the unrestrained paroxysms from the surgery, Mrs Givings would like to know why such wonders of the electrified age might not also be of benefit to the general female population.

Wracked with pleasure. From the author of Dead Man’s Cell Phone and The Clean House, comes a comedy about knowing what is good for you even though there are no acceptable words for it.

2010 PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST FOR DRAMA

2010 TONY AWARD NOMINEE FOR BEST PLAY

‘[It] sparkles with wit and invention' - Variety

‘One of the most gifted and adventurous playwrights to emerge in recent years' - The New York Times

Two middle-aged women talk in a room. One is recently returned. One has always been there. Between them sits their past. The Dream Life of Butterflies is a beautiful dissertation on the illusion of memory and the impossibility of retrieving what has been lost.
In a seamless single scene, award-winning writer Raimondo Cortese exposes their delusions about themselves and each other, hinting at the terrible taboo at the heart of their relationship.

WORLD PREMIERE
‘One of the most exciting playwrights around’ - The Age

Following the success of the inaugural 2010 program, MTC will again select a group of Ambassadors in 2011. Meeting regularly, these twenty-five, Year 11 theatre-lovers will have the chance to extend their knowledge and experience by attending MTC productions, hearing from guest speakers, and sharing their responses to theatre with a group of like-minded young people.

Benefits of being an MTC Ambassador:
• Ambassadors receive a free ticket to eight of MTC’s Season 2011 productions and two Lawler Studio productions.
• Ambassadors get the opportunity to meet with theatre professionals, and find out about the inner workings of one of Australia’s largest theatre companies.
• Ambassadors take a leadership role which has two functions; to act as youth representatives within the Company, and to act as advocates for MTC within their school and social communities.
• The Ambassador program brings together like-minded young people who can engage in a level of in-depth discussion about theatre which may not always be possible in the classroom.

Students in Year 11 in 2011 are eligible for nomination by the Head of Drama or Performing Arts or another relevant teacher. Only one nomination will be accepted per school.

For further information or to download a nomination form, please visit MTC or contact education@mtc.com.au.

Nominations close on Friday 8 April 2011. Whether successful or not, nominees will be notified by mail by the end of the Easter holidays, and the first Ambassador event will be held on 10 May 2011.
 

Australian Premiere

Preparing for just another day, suburban mother Diana Goodman makes the family’s lunches and cannot stop. The piles of sandwiches signal her gradually loosening grip – on her life, on her family, on her sanity. Soon, there is a doctor, a diagnosis and a course of treatment, yet the cause to this case of ordinary madness lies beyond medicine and therapy.

An emotional powerhouse of a musical. Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, Next to Normal is about a woman lost to herself and her family.

2010 PULITZER PRIZE FOR DRAMA

WINNER OF 3 TONY AWARDS 2009 (INCLUDING BEST ORIGINAL SCORE)

'Brave, breathtaking ... a feel-everything musical' - The New York Times

'More than a triumph - it's next to wondrous' - New York Daily News

Out of the blue, into the darkness

It starts as an ordinary day, full of ordinary stuff you’d forget pretty quickly. You don’t want to get out of bed, your Mum burns the porridge, and your stinky little brother does something that drives you spare - nothing new. But later on this ordinary day comes a message: ‘Get home quick’, and suddenly the day’s not ordinary any more. It’s now a nightmare day, wretched and strange, and you look back at every ordinary, boring detail for the slightest sign that everything was forever about to change. But there are no signs, because chance, blind chance, has done its evil. It’s meaningless … stupid … random.

In this brilliant one person show, Zahra Newman switches from role to role to deliver multiple perspectives on a family and a community pulled apart by a senseless and random act of violence. A taut, wrenching tragedy, debbie tucker green’s Random is a poetic gem, full of horror, humour and, ultimately, hope.

Listed on the VCE Unit 3 Drama Playlist.

Education bookings can be made via email
General Public bookings via MTC website

Sadie and Ed meet Martin and Chloë at a holiday resort and instantly hit it off, despite coming from completely different worlds. When Martin saves Ed’s life, everyone knows the debt can never be properly repaid. But Ed is rich and generous, and Martin and Chloë have a need so great it seems divine providence that the two couples should have found each other. So, given time to think, they return to make their wish - but surely it's a wish nobody could possibly grant?
White elephant. Wrapped in Joanna Murray-Smith’s glinting dialogue, The Gift opens to reveal another witty examination of our modern moral confusions.

WORLD PREMIERE
'Fresh imagination, shimmering wit and emotional honesty' - Time Out
‘Murray-Smith has Oscar Wilde’s gift for one-liners’ - Daily Mail

Literary theory may seem harmless, but mix it with the impish personality of Danny, a precocious high school student, and the result is not deconstruction but sheer devastation. When a certain controversial book falls into his hands, it’s time to create his own provocative meta-narrative. As his actions send the school into chaos, he learns that, although the author is dead and meaning lacks foundation, the real world has no time for irony.
Hard work at the chalkface. Set against a backdrop of staffroom politics, Melbourne writer Robert Reid’s mainstage debut for MTC gets a high distinction for his satirical dissection of education and its discontents

World Premiere

'Fearless Writing' - InPress

Summoned home upon his father’s death, Hamlet discovers his mother already remarried to his father’s brother and the country in disarray. A midnight encounter with his father’s ghost sets him on the road to revenge. But how can he be sure his cause is just? Should he strike or stay his hand?
The play’s the thing. Shakespeare’s towering revenge tragedy receives a fresh, contemporary interpretation from the team that brought Richard III so thrillingly to life in 2010.

‘But I have that within thich passeth show; these but the trappings and the suits of woe'

- Hamlet in Act I, Scene II

‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all'

- Hamlet in Act III Scene I

On his shambles of a yacht in the marina, Baxter watches his wreck of a life fall with the tide. It’s Australia Day and his plan had been to get so thoroughly shickered that he’d be past caring by the time the fireworks start. And, he’s some way down the road to that ambition, when an English backpacker called Dee turns up, swearing a blue streak and threatening to rock his boat.
Barely keeping it afloat. In creating this tough yet affectionate portrait of life on an ebbing tide, award-winning writer Tim Winton brings to the stage all the humanity, larrikin humour and unsentimental pathos for which his novels are so well-loved.

MILES FRANKLIN AWARD (2009, 2002, 1992, 1984)
TWO TIME BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE (2002, 1995)

‘He's shown an exquisite feel for the language, the smell, the very pulse of Australia' - Andrew Denton

In the same house on two afternoons fifty years apart, two couples pack up to move. In 1959, Russ and Bev are confronted by white neighbours who don’t want them to sell their house to a black family. In 2009, another set of neighbours meet to discuss the planned demolition of the house by a gentrifying white couple. Times change and so do attitudes, but the raw nerve of race in America still stings at the slightest touch.

Race and real estate. An acutely observed social comedy, Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park asks why Americans have never found a plain and honest way to communicate across the colour line.

Australian Premiere
‘Memorable and funny' - The New York Times
‘His scathing treatment of bigotry, hypocrisy and smugness is inspired' - The Washington Examiner

Alice returns home to the sleepy seaside town of Tathra and everything seems just as she left it. So why does it seem so unfamiliar? It’s as if she’s forgotten everything she’s ever known, everything she needs to make a settled, simple life. Her family try to help her out and she wants to settle down – really she does – but some part of her still floats way up there in the blue.
Gravity’s insistent tug. Welcome to the fresh and off-centre world of award-winning playwright Lally Katz, making her MTC debut with a play that looks deeply to the strangeness within.

World Premiere
'The parallel universe of Lally Katz's imagination is an estranging, breathlessly anxious, uneasily hilarious place' - The Australian

Algernon and Jack are good friends, who each maintain, as a matter of convenience, different identities depending on whether they are in the town or the country. It therefore becomes especially inconvenient, not to say confusing, when Jack proposes to Algernon’s cousin Gwendolyn under the pseudonym of ‘Ernest’, while Algernon proposes to Jack’s ward Cecily also under the pseudonym of ‘Ernest’. In truth, no one is particularly earnest, except the imperious Lady Bracknell, who takes a dim view of everything.
Wildely improbable. Amid a flurry of mistaken identity, witty banter and cucumber sandwiches, Oscar Wilde created the most elegant of comedies of manners.

'This clever, glamorous production did full justice to Wilde's brilliant play'
- The Australian (for MTC's 1988 production)
‘The most perfect high comedy in the English language' - The Telegraph

Dave reckons he’s quite the ladies man. With Barry White on the stereo and a bottle of tequila on the shelf, he knows how to create a mood. But Kate, the hairdresser he meets one night in his karaoke bar and brings back to his place, is a hard case. She’s deep, she’s defensive, she’s troubled. Sure, Dave can break through, but can he deal with what is on the other side?
Hilarious yet deeply moving, The Water Carriers is from multi-award-winning playwright Ian Wilding. Featuring Sarah Sutherland; directed by Anne Browning.

WORLD PREMIERE
WINNER OF THE PATRICK WHITE PLAYWRIGHTS' AWARD (2002, 2009)

At an under-subscribed six-week acting class at a community college, four adults and their teacher go through their exercises designed to loosen their bodies, strengthen their voices and liberate their imaginations. Yet as the weeks pass, the participants discover that something utterly transformative is being created between them.
US writer Annie Baker has written a poignant, funny play that packs a major wallop. Featuring Brigid Gallacher; directed by Aidan Fennessy.

AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE
‘Absorbing, unblinking and sharply funny' - The New York Times