By Cameron Woodhead
With six world premieres and nine Australian works, Melbourne Theatre Company’s 2025 season reflects the flourishing diversity of the present, while casting fresh eyes on the past.
Playwright David Williamson put bums on seats at the MTC for decades, but one work – his ultra-violent satire on Australian masculinity, The Removalists (1971) – was too much for the company when first written.
Anne-Louise Sarks, David Williamson and Tasnim Hossain this week.Credit: Eugene Hyland
“I submitted the script of The Removalists to the MTC, and they went, ‘Aaargh!’” says Williamson, waving his hands in mock distress. “The play wouldn’t have had a ghost of a chance without Bruce Spence and Peter Cummins and all those artists doing it at La Mama for nothing.”
The La Mama crew, on the other hand, had rejected Don’s Party (1971) as “too middle-class for us” (it was a hit at the MTC) and wanted something grittier, and so The Removalists was born.
Simon Chilvers (Sergeant Dan Simmonds) and Michael Edgar (Kenny) in a scene from The Removalists at the MTC in 1974.Credit: Martin Pollard
While the MTC can’t find any records of turning down the script when the play was first written, it staged The Removalists in 1974.
The original production launched Williamson’s career and became the stuff of Australian theatre legend. He and partner Kristin fell in love while performing in it – an event, he says, that “wasn’t without turbulence because we were both married and there’s no way it could ever happen, but of course, it did”.
A touchstone for Australian theatre’s revolutionary New Wave, The Removalists was misread by critics and artists at the time, Williamson notes, as “failed naturalism” or a “searing indictment of police brutality” rather than “a very dark satire on the worst aspects of Australian male behaviour”.
Stunned silence preceded applause on opening night. At one show, Williamson recalls, an audience member burst into tears and leapt onstage, begging one actor to stop beating another.
Asked about the failure of La Mama to receive operational funding from the federal government, the playwright looks stricken.
“I can’t believe the short-sightedness of the funding bodies. They pour untold millions into … ‘high art’ forms and begrudge a tiny bit of money to the first level of Australian creativity.
“It’s tragic. I wouldn’t be a playwright without [La Mama founder] Betty Burstall getting fired up, coming back from visiting the small theatres of New York and saying: ‘We’ll never find [new Australian playwrights] unless we give them a space.’”
MTC artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks agrees. “Artists need a place to explore and test their skills,” she says. “It’s essential not just for our art form, [but] for our culture.”
For Sarks, programming and directing The Removalists is one way of fighting cultural erasure and vandalism. “We’re talking all the time about new Australian work, but we neglect our canon. We don’t even treat it, I think, as a canon a lot of the time.”
Looking to the past is crucial to honouring theatre as an “art form of the present”, as Sarks puts it, and she and Williamson regret the play’s continued relevance. The Removalists begins with police responding to domestic violence, with Australian statistics today worse than when the play premiered.
It’s rare for an Australian show to return to the MTC so quickly, but 37 will kick off the company’s 2025 season.Credit: Pia Johnson
Another revival is more recent. A play winning back-to-back seasons at the MTC is almost unheard of, but that’s exactly what Nathan Maynard has done with 37 – an uplifting anthem to the unifying power of football and an unflinching tackle on racism in sport.
It’s been a magnet for first-time audiences, with huge appeal to what Sarks describes as “people who love footy and never imagined they’d darken the doors of a theatre”.
Next year’s program will continue attracting new audiences with 13 local and international works. Straight from Broadway, the tragicomic drama, Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions, will star Sigrid Thornton. Tasnim Hossain will direct a West End success from Deborah Frances-White, creator of The Guilty Feminist podcast, called Never Have I Ever – a raunchy comedy skewering the dynamics of class, race and sexuality through a boozy reunion of old university friends.
Andrea James will dig deep into suppressed First Nations history for The Black Woman of Gippsland. The acclaimed writer of Counting and Cracking, S. Shakthidharan, brings us The Wrong Gods. Kimberly Akimbo, a musical that swept the Tony Awards, will make its Australian premiere.
We’ll also get Kirsty Marillier’s Destiny, a family drama set in apartheid South Africa; Cory Taylor’s Dying: A Memoir, adapted by Benjamin Law; a production of Much Ado About Nothing for Shakespeare lovers; and a stage adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, starring Pamela Rabe, Nikki Shiels and Bert LaBonté.
There’s little in the 2025 program veteran theatregoers won’t look forward to seeing, and much to entice newcomers into the fold.
The full 2025 program for the Melbourne Theatre Company is out now.
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