This was published 7 years ago
Malthouse Theatre to stage Melancholia, Picnic at Hanging Rock and more in 2018
By Cameron Woodhead
Malthouse Theatre's 2018 season offers a bold and diverse program, often with a political edge. From Australian classics to visions of the apocalypse, Indigenous superheroes to the world's most renowned protest theatre, it builds on past success and features a slew of artists, sometimes in novel and intriguing collaborations, bound to entice any theatregoer with a sense of adventure.
Leeanna Walsman and Eryn Jean Norvill will be appearing in Melancholia.Credit: Zan Wimberley
It opens with the return of Picnic at Hanging Rock, back by popular demand before heading to the Barbican in London. I wasn't wild about it, but this stylish and disorienting production was enthusiastically embraced by audiences here and in Edinburgh and now, in a rare distinction, will appear on the main stage of one of the world's great theatre cities.
Next year will see overseas artists reciprocate, with Belarus Free Theatre to revisit Melbourne. Formed underground in its homeland – Europe's last dictatorship, where the company has been declared illegal – you may have seen its urgent, provocative brand of artistic resistance here at the Melbourne Festival in 2013, or with Pussy Riot in Burning Doors.
This time it's Generation Jeans, about growing up in an authoritarian society where even denim is verboten, but the company will also devise a new work, Trustees, teaming with five local artists to interrogate the "Great Australian Silence", exploring issues of freedom, censorship and control in our own country.
From Britain, the fearless and funny Bryony Kimmings (Sex Idiot, Fake It 'Til You Make It, Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model) will join forces with Complicite (The Encounter) for A Pacifist's Guide to the War on Cancer. Uh, it's a musical. About cancer. And, as anyone who has seen these artists will know, it'll likely be brilliant.
The Malthouse regularly reinvents Australian classics, and 2018 is no exception with Peter Carey's debut novel Bliss adapted to the stage. A satirical morality fable about an adman who wakes up in a fluorescent Australian hell, it has already inspired a film and an opera, and will now be a play, written by Tom Wright, directed by Matt Lutton, and starring Mark Leonard Winter.
"Theatre can bring a unique depth and presence to Carey's storytelling," Lutton says, "The protagonist is constantly spinning yarns and we want the audience to feel like tourists in hell, with Winter acting as both pilgrim and infernal tour guide."
A more imminent vision of the end time should emerge from Melancholia. Declan Greene will adapt the masterly and enigmatic Lars von Trier film, with Eryn Jean Norvill in the Kirsten Dunst role, playing a bride who shifts from psychological collapse to serenity while a rogue planet hurtles towards Earth.
"If you focus on the human element, Melancholia is almost a chamber piece," Lutton says, and though he won't be ignoring the opportunity for spectacle that planet-wide destruction presents, he remains tight-lipped about how it will be achieved.
New work includes diverse Australian voices. Osama Sami (Ali's Wedding) will stage his award-winning memoir Good Muslim Boy, involving a Kafkaesque odyssey to return his father's remains from Iran. Michele Lee's Going Down pits two authors – a sex diarist and a purveyor of "migration porn" – against each other, in a satire skewering the cliche and commodification that often go hand in hand with portrayals of the migrant experience.
Nakkiah Lui's Blackie Blackie Brown will be a live-action comic strip, with extensive animations, following an Indigenous archaeologist who develops superpowers, and isn't afraid to use them to seek justice for the massacre and dispossession of her ancestors. That revenge fantasy is in stark contrast to the other Indigenous story – Jada Alberts' debut Brothers Wreck, an intensely moving domestic drama about a Darwin family riven by grief.
No Malthouse season would be complete without a kiss from the avant-garde, and it doesn't get more challenging than Sarah Kane's Blasted. The late British playwright's controversial, and ultimately acclaimed, work confronts all kinds of atrocity in the world and has them implode into the personal, achieving a brutal poetry every intrepid theatregoer should want the chance to experience.