Gizli yazışmaların ortaya çıkış mücadelesi 2027’de Sydney sahnesine taşınıyor

STC’s 2027 program also features Celeste Barber in Amy Sedaris and David Sedaris play, Tim Minchin as Scrooge and the return of The Picture of Dorian Gray

Six years after the Australian historian Jenny Hocking won her legal battle to release secret correspondence between Queen Elizabeth II, Malcolm Fraser and the governor general John Kerr, her fight to reveal the truth about Gough Whitlam’s dismissal is being adapted for the stage.

The Palace Letters, announced on Monday as part of Sydney Theatre Company’s 2027 program, will have its world premiere at Sydney Opera House in April. It will star Georgie Parker as Hocking, with Jonathan Biggins playing Whitlam.

STC’s artistic director, Mitchell Butel, described the play as Hocking’s “Erin Brockovich journey through the court system”, with the first half following the historian’s case and the second taking place immediately after the dismissal.

All together, the STC’s 2027 program boasts four world premieres and six Australian premieres, including Robert Icke’s modern retelling of Oedipus, which starred Lesley Manville and Mark Strong in the West End and Broadway productions. “It’s one of the most electric pieces of theatre I’ve seen,” said Butel, who has cast Heather Mitchell and Richard Roxburgh as Jocasta and Oedipus.

The adaptation takes the Sophocles tragedy and propels it into a contemporary setting, where Oedipus is a politician awaiting election results. It will be staged at Roslyn Packer Theatre in January and February before heading to Adelaide festival in March.

The comedian Celeste Barber will make her STC debut in The Book of Liz, a 90-minute off-Broadway comedy written by the sibling duo David and Amy Sedaris. Barber will play Sister Elizabeth Donderstock, a runaway from a religious sect who is “clueless about sex and the modern world but armed with a formidably sunny disposition”.

STC’s global hit The Picture of Dorian Gray will return to Roslyn Packer Theatre, with the former artistic director Kip Williams back in the director’s chair. Nikki Shiels, who was the understudy for the original Dorian, Eryn Jean Norvill, will step into the spotlight for its homecoming run, playing all 26 characters in the marathon cinetheatre show, which will also tour to Brisbane.

Norvill is also making her return to STC, this time playing all the characters in Vanya – the Olivier award-winning adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. The actor will co-direct the play with Helpmann award-winning director Marion Potts.

Tim Minchin – last seen on stage for STC in 2013’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – is taking on the role of Scrooge in the British playwright Jack Thorne’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Matthew Warchus, the British director of Minchin’s hit Matilda the Musical, will direct the Sydney show, which runs from November to Boxing Day.

A brand-new stage version of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries is also on the bill, with Mama Does Derby’s Amber McMahon donning a black bob to play Phryne Fisher. The play takes place on a cruise ship and is adapted from one of Kerry Greenwood’s books which didn’t make it into the Essie Davis TV series. The show premiere will in Brisbane before making its way to Sydney in May.

Also on the program is a new Australian version of the Broadway hit John Proctor is the Villain, about a class of high school students grappling with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, heading to both Sydney and Melbourne. Becky Shaw, a “cracking dark American comedy about dating and sex and romance and family” straight from Broadway, is also on the cards, as is a Thelma and Louise-style story called Amah and Nanna, starring Home and Away’s Lynne McGranger.

Rounding out the program is “a study of masculinity that isn’t toxic”, Butel said: The Fifth Step, a two-hander starring Ashan Kumar and Erik Thomson as a young man and his AA sponsor. The play, by the Northern Irish-playwright David Ireland, was performed by Martin Freeman and Jack Lowden in London last year.

The Bookbinder of Jericho by Pip Williams, a co-production between STC and State Theatre Company South Australia, will also head to Sydney and Adelaide. And Logan St, written and directed by Jacob Boehme, about friendship found in the grounds of Australia’s oldest mosque, comes to Sydney after its debut in Adelaide this year.

“I genuinely think this is a season that will dazzle on a sensual level,” Butel said. But I really hope the themes speak to who we are as a species and as a nation now.”

Kaynak: The Guardian · Özgün metin İngilizcedir.