Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre is promising eight compelling reasons to visit the theatre in 2024, as the season is unveiled.
“This is a highly theatrical season. There isn’t a moment of domesticity or realism in sight, as every work celebrates theatre that transports you into fantasies, heightened realities, folklore, or ecstasy,” Malthouse Theatre Co-CEO and Artistic Director Matthew Lutton OAM says. “It is very deliberately a season of productions celebrating how theatrical theatre can be.”
The season follows on from Malthouse’s commitment to inclusivity and removing barriers for audiences that have not previously attended.
The year opens in unflinching style, with the theatrical premiere of ‘The Hate Race’, a re-telling of the Caribbean-Australian writer Maxine Beneba Clarke’s award-winning memoir exposing the realities and the sting of otherness.
Next, after a triumphant debut in 2022 garnering wide acclaim, Malthouse presents a return season of ‘Yentl’ from Kadimah Yiddish Theatre. This new stage adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story is the first since the 1975 Broadway play and Barbra Streisand’s 1983 musical film. It’s an ode to the feminist undertones and queer subtext of the original story, and an invitation to celebration the beauty of Yiddish culture.
Audiences are then invited to join an odyssey of self-discovery and liberation, with ‘Homo Pentecostus’, where actor, dancer and writer Joel Bray unveils an intimate exploration of his secret queer identity, in the confines of a 1990s Pentecostal Church.
'Homo Pentecostus' - Image © Kristian Gehradte
May will also see the world premiere of the latest work from Back To Back Theatre, ‘MULTIPLE BAD THINGS’. The company explores the notion that everyone’s version of the perfect world looks a bit different – so how do you build a utopia that meets everyone’s expectations?
As the second half of the year arrives, playwright Zinnie Harris reimagines Shakespeare in ‘Macbeth (An Undoing)’, from Lady Macbeth’s perspective. It’s an exhilarating tale of manipulation, ambition, and the intoxicating need to challenge the roles others prescribe for you.
Artist Nicola Gunn unpacks her personal fantasy of being a French actress (despite being categorically not French) in ‘The Interpreters (Apologia)’.
Acclaimed writer Pamela Carter and Malthouse Theatre Artistic Director Matthew Lutton collaborate on an ambitious, highly technical stage version of A24 film ‘Under The Skin’, which is adapted from the Michel Faber sci-fi novel.
Finally, Fat Fruit (Sarah Ward and Bec Matthews) and Director Susie Dee close out Malthouse’s 2024 season with a wild, mutinous, punk celebration of Christmas: ‘F… Christmas’. Suffocating binaries of boys and girls, naughty and nice, sitting on an old man’s knee. . . It’s time to unwrap secular tradition and create an alternative celebration.
Malthouse Theatre’s 2024 season starts with ‘The Hate Race’ in February.
