State Theatre Company of South Australia Announces 2012 Season

A celebration of the centenary of Patrick White’s birth, a double bill of hard-hitting modern works and the play that will leave everyone ‘buzzing’ are amongst the offerings in State Theatre Company’s 2012 season, announced today (September 25) at the Company Open Day.

2012 is also the Company’s 40th anniversary, celebrating the 1972 State Theatre Company of South Australia Act.

“Here we are, forty years on, celebrating four decades of theatrical ‘enactment’ and imaginative enterprise. Our audiences have born witness to innumerable ‘acts’ over the last forty years and we’re still powering on, as strong as ever,” said Artistic Director Adam Cook.

Just over fifty years after the premiere by Adelaide University Theatre Guild, Patrick White’s The Ham Funeral is presented as part of the 2012 Adelaide Festival, with a cast including Amanda Muggleton and original cast member Dennis Olsen. When a newly widowed woman attempts to seduce a young poet at her husband’s wake, there are comically tragic consequences.

Tennessee Williams’ evocation of loneliness and lost love, The Glass Menagerie, brings to life the American Deep South of the 1930s, and the Education show War Mother is sixty minutes of intense scrutiny of humankind, comprised of three short plays and a pinch of Brecht songs thrown in for good measure.

A co-presentation with Windmill Theatre is Pinocchio, a modern update on the beloved children’s story and a witty, gothic, rocking music theatre spectacular!

Next up, and just as relevant today as it was in Margaret Thatcher’s England, is Top Girls by Caryl Churchill, examining the complex challenges working women face in the contemporary business world, and society at large.

Under the heading These Premises Are Alarmed comes ‘two plays for the price of one’, each with a short season in the Space Theatre and sure to shock, challenge and inspire the next generation of thinkers: Blasted by Sarah Kane, featuring a violent face-off in a Leeds hotel room; and Pornography by Simon Stephens, set around the 2005 London Underground attacks. Netta Yaschin and Daniel Clarke will also make their respective debuts as State Theatre Company directors with these productions.

Finally, jump back a few hundred years to the time when an ankle was breathtaking and nobody ever went to the bathroom, with Sarah Ruhl’s In The Next Room or the vibrator play featuring a doctor obsessed with the new miracle of electricity, his romance-starved wife, and some exciting new inventions…

The Ham Funeral will be performed in the Odeon Theatre at Norwood, with These Premises Are Alarmed and War Mother taking place in the Space Theatre. War Mother will also tour selected South Australia suburbs and regions after the Adelaide season. All remaining productions will be performed in the Dunstan Playhouse.

Subscriptions will be available from Monday 26 September through BASS, with single tickets on sale from Monday 7 November.

To keep up with the latest news and reviews at Stage Whispers, click here to like us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.