A critic’s view on Melbourne theatre in 2025

2 hours ago 2

By Cameron Woodhead

December 21, 2025 — 5.00am

In a year which saw blockbuster productions from Annie to MJ the Musical hit the Melbourne stage, the performance of our independent theatre companies is even more impressive.

Across our city, some smaller venues have been punching well above their weight.

Down at Theatre Works in St Kilda, the indefatigable Di Toulson – who in 2026 will be stepping down after eight years as executive director – has utterly transformed a moribund, underutilised venue into a bustling performance hub across two locations since the pandemic. The 2025 highlights – flatpack’s vivid production of Control, or Colour and Light: The Art of Sondheim from indie company Watch This – came amid a lot of underwhelming stuff, true, but the right to fail is crucial for younger artists to develop their craft, and Toulson’s expansive vision and relentless work ethic won’t be easily replaced.

The Melbourne Fringe Festival under Simon Abrahams, too, continues to expand its reach, attracting not just lauded Australian artists (even Patricia Cornelius had a play at the Fringe last year) but also established companies from around the world, such as Ontroerend Goed and Mammalian Diving Reflex. It’s looking more like an international arts festival every year.

More curated indie programs at fortyfivedownstairs under Cameron Lukey, or Red Stitch Actors Theatre led by Ella Caldwell, regularly match and sometimes outshine mainstage fare.

The former gave us a brutally condensed Othello; a visually striking, exquisitely performed exploration of contemporary masculinity in Boys on the Verge of Tears; the poetic resurrection of overlooked artist Joy Hester in Where Is Joy; and Max Gillies honouring the late Jack Hibberd with an excerpt from A Stretch of the Imagination in the short performance suite Endgames.

Boys on the Verge of Tears is set entirely in a male bathroom.

The latter delivered Joanna Murray-Smith’s classic four-hander Honour, Keziah Warner’s What’s Yours, a thorny new play on the ethics of procreation, and Emilie Collyer’s Super, a seriously funny superhero satire which this month was shortlisted for the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award in drama.

On the flip side, for the first time since its founding in 1967, La Mama Theatre was closed to public performance throughout 2025. Whether that was the right decision is highly questionable. The organisation missed out on four-year operational funding twice, in 2020 and 2024. Even so, the mere threat of closure was enough to secure an emergency two-year pilot program authorised by Arts Minister Tony Burke in November 2024, correcting (for now) Creative Australia’s egregious oversight. Why not reopen halfway through 2025? No compelling answer has been offered, and although the 2026 season looks vibrant, it isn’t qualitatively different to what La Mama was programming before it was shut.

Artists and audiences were dealt a second blow with the sudden closure of long-running cabaret venue The Butterfly Club in July. Still, other institutions have evolved to fill vacant niches. The Motley Bauhaus has been buzzing with Gen Z energy in Carlton since the nearby La Mama went dark, most recently with the talented two-hander Sabotage.

On the mainstage, it wasn’t a great year for Malthouse Theatre. Matthew Lutton’s decade-long run at the helm of the company ended with more whimper than bang. Signs of trouble at the company predate 2025: a planned stage adaptation of Michel Faber’s wonderfully creepy Under the Skin was cancelled without public explanation last year. Lutton also withdrew from directing Tom Wright’s Troy, a shapeless take on the Trojan War that ended up being a bit of a mess.

Pony Cam put their own spin on Chekhov in The Orchard.

The season did platform leading indie lights: the anarchic Blak satirists at A Daylight Connection brought A Nightime Travesty to a wider audience, and the experimental mavericks at Pony Cam finally made work in an actual theatre, cutting Chekhov down to size in The Orchard.

The two standouts, however, were Patricia Cornelius’ Truth, incisive ensemble theatre that examined journalism, surveillance, and the power of the state through the story of Julian Assange; and The Red Shoes, the finale to Meow Meow’s exquisite cabaret trilogy based on Hans Christian Anderson stories, which danced on the edge of the apocalypse, its precarity held aloft through sardonic wit, chaotic variety performance, and transfixing vocal splendour.

At the MTC, subscribers are getting their money’s worth since Anne-Louise Sarks took the reins. The programming is almost always solid. Occasionally, it’s so inspired that a show gets a second season. Nathan Maynard’s 37 earned such a rare reprise, the big-hearted footy play returning to kick off the company’s offering in 2025. (Another gem, the marvellous musical based on Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career, will do the same in 2026.)

Other highlights included Nikki Shiels and Pamela Rabe in Rebecca, Christie Whelan Browne in the whimsical musical Kimberly Akimbo; a timely revival of David Williamson’s The Removalists, Sigrid Thornton’s marvellous performance in Mother Play, a funny and poignant production of Much Ado About Nothing with outbursts of gendered clowning, and S. Shakthidharan’s The Wrong Gods, a tense family drama pitting globalisation against tradition in rural India, shown as part of the Rising Festival.

Director Mark Wilson delivers a clever, playful and very funny staging of Much Ado About Nothing.

That festival seems to have found its feet at last, with a packed program of local and international artists catering to popular and underground tastes, from Beth Gibbons of Portishead fame giving a rare live concert to subterranean art adventures in a bolthole below Fed Square.

The first Asia TOPA since early 2020 had highlights, too – notably Kagami, a virtual reality piano concert from Ryuichi Sakamoto given from beyond the grave – but with a few exceptions, such as Yumi Umiumare’s ButohBar: Out of Order II, it didn’t seem as strong or as daring theatre-wise as previous incarnations.

Commercial musicals included the Melbourne premieres of the super-slick Michael Jackson jukebox favourite, MJ the Musical and Hadestown, a steampunk-inflected reworking of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. There was a bright revival of Annie with Anthony Warlow reprising Daddy Warbucks (a role he played on Broadway) and a rousing, arena-style staging of Les Misérables.

All up, another bustling year in one of the world’s significant theatre cities, even if the foundation of it all – the ongoing creative health and sustainability of indie performance – is showing palpable signs of stress.

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.