This play is a disaster – and the MTC hopes it will be a huge success

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An ambitious new work about the worst engineering disaster in Australian history is one of the major offerings in the Melbourne Theatre Company’s 2026 season.

West Gate, written by former shearer and construction worker Dennis McIntosh, will tackle the story of the West Gate Bridge collapse in 1970, in which 35 men died. Director Iain Sinclair – who helmed MTC’s stripped-back telling of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge in 2019 – will help bring the piece to life.

Actor Daniela Farinacci and director Iain Sinclair will take on the story of Australia’s worst engineering disaster in West Gate next year as part of the 2026 MTC program.

MTC artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks was immediately struck by the relevance of McIntosh’s piece when she read an early draft almost two years ago.

“I felt like this is a work we need to do because we are a state theatre company, and this story is about Melbourne, it’s for Melbourne,” she says. “It has a national reach – it’s the worst industrial disaster in Australian history – but it’s our story.”

It is, she adds, McIntosh’s story, too. “He was at Newport Primary School when the bridge collapsed. He speaks so passionately about it because he has a genuine connection to this story, to those people, and he has worked really hard to engage with survivors and families, to do his research, and the result is a work that is so human.”

Also in the line-up is a work that examines the very notion of what it means to be human.

MTC artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks.

Tom Holloway’s Eliza is based on the true story of Dr Joseph Weizenbaum – to be played by Dan Spielman – who was a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose language-simulation program ELIZA (named after the heroine of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion) was published in 1966 and ultimately gave rise to modern chatbots.

The success of his work, however, troubled Weizenbaum, who went on to become a leading critic of artificial intelligence, and especially its potential adoption by the military-industrial complex.

“I’m not a hugely technological person, but I knew when I first saw that script that it was a very urgent work,” says Sarks. “It looks through that historical lens at the questions everyone is asking right now about technology, about AI, about human engagement, and so we need to get that play on next year. I think there’s something quite beautiful about the very human form of theatre grappling with that challenge.”

In a program of 12 plays, 10 are by Australian writers, seven are world premieres, and the same number have been developed through the company’s Next Stage writers’ program.

Donné Ngabo will star in Retrograde in 2026.

“I came to this company [in 2023] with a vision to put Australian work at the centre of the company,” says Sarks. “And this season, I feel, really delivers on that.”

The 2026 program will kick off in January with an encore run of My Brilliant Career, ahead of a tour to Canberra, Sydney and Wollongong. Talks over an international run for the musical, meanwhile, are progressing.

There will be new works from Marieke Hardy (Losing Face, a comedy about perimenopause, wellness and ageing, starring Genevieve Morris and Michala Banas) and Jean Tong (director of Dying: A Memoir, which opens this week), whose Do Not Pass Go will star Katy Maudlin and Belinda McClory as two colleagues “navigating identity, politics and their generational divide”.

Daniel Henshall and Catherine Văn-Davies will star in Uncle Vanya.

Acclaimed screen actor Daniel Henshall (Snowtown, How to Make Gravy) will return to the stage in Joanna Murray-Smith’s reimagining of Uncle Vanya, the first MTC staging of a Chekhov play since Simon Stone tackled The Cherry Orchard in 2013.

Another classic being dusted off – this one for the first time in more than 20 years – is The Glass Menagerie, with Alison Whyte and Tim Draxl leading the cast of Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece in April.

Having made his directorial debut last year with Top Dog/Underdog, acclaimed actor Bert LaBonte will next tackle Retrograde, the Olivier-nominated three-hander that centres on a real-life encounter between Sidney Poitier (Donné Ngabo) and a fast-talking studio lawyer (Alan Dale) in 1950s Hollywood.

From the acclaimed duo of S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack (Counting and Cracking) comes The Jungle and the Sea, which debuted at Belvoir St Theatre in 2022 and won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for drama in 2024. Set against the backdrop of Sri Lanka’s civil war, it is billed as a sweeping family drama that draws on real-life testimonies.

And making its stage debut in November will be an adaptation by writer Grace Chapple and director Hannah Goodwin of E.M. Forster’s classic novel, A Room With a View, with Nathalie Morris (Bump) starring as Lucy Honeychurch, the role made famous by Helena Bonham Carter in the 1985 Merchant-Ivory film adaptation.

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