State Theatre Company SA 2025

State Theatre Company South Australia’s 2025 Season invites audiences to immerse themselves in a mix of theatrical drama, comedy, musical theatre and reimagined classics. Season 2025 highlights range through Emily Steel’s behind-the-scenes dive into Australian politics in Housework to the Tony Award-winning Best Musical Kimberley Akimbo, to the legendary The Glass Menagerie.

The seven-show program, announced by outgoing Artistic Director Mitchell Butel, also includes a festival of new South Australian plays in Great Australian Bites.

Butel says, “It’s a season that’s full of works about making a change and making a difference. It’s also the last season I will have had the pleasure and privilege of curating as Artistic Director of this glorious company. I have loved my time with this company and community over the past six years and I hope the shows we’ve been able to create and share in that time have changed you and left their mark.”

Butel marks the end of his 6-year tenure with strong and witty women across different centuries continuing the make change for the next generation. From Canberra’s corridors of power in Emily Steel’s world premiere black comedy Housework, starring Susie Youssef and Emily Taheny, to their ancestors fighting for equal rights and power over language in a return season of The Dictionary of Lost Words adapted by Verity Laughton, from the novel by Pip Williams.

Later in the year, a young Italian-Australian transforms into the hero she’s destined to be in the acclaimed stage adaptation of Melina Marchetta’s book and film Looking For Alibrandi by Vidya Rajan. Then audiences will be introduced to an idiosyncratic ice-skating teen being changed by the love of another and of herself, starring Marina Prior, Casey Donovan, Christie Whelan Browne and Nathan O’Keefe in the Australian premiere of the musical Kimberley Akimbo with music by Jeanine Tesori (Shrek, Fun Home) and book by David Lindsay-Abaire (Ripcord), directed by Butel.

In Dear Son: Letters and Reflections From First Nations Fathers, based on the book by Thomas Mayo, adapted by Isaac Drandic (At What Cost?) and John Harvey and featuring Trevor Jamieson (Storm Boy, The Secret River) and Jimi Bani (Mabo, Every Brilliant Thing), audiences will hear from prominent First Nation Australian fathers (including Troy Cassar-Daley and Jack Latimore) who have nurtured their sons and our country’s culture.

Great Australian Bites will feature new offerings by South Australian writers Piri Eddy, Anthony Nocera, Sarah Peters, Alex Vickery-Howe, Nicola Watson and Alexis West.

The curtain closes in 2025 with The Glass Menagerie, an American classic and one of Tennessee Williams’ most powerful and affecting plays starring Ksenja Logos and Kathryn Adams.

statetheatrecompany.com.au

HOUSEWORK

By Emily Steel
Presented in association with Adelaide Festival Centre

7-22 February

Dunstan Playhouse

How’d I get so wise? I watched my dreams die. And then I kept going.

Kelly Sheppard, a naive but excited junior staffer in the Electorate Office of Ruth Mandour, Minister for Health, unexpectedly gets the chance to travel to Canberra with the passionate MP she idolises and Ruth’s brilliant-but-exhausted Chief of Staff, Anna Cooper. Anna is juggling Ruth’s new policy launch, a husband who can’t deal with their kid in her absence and the type of muffins the Minister requires for a cabinet meeting, while Kelly’s over the moon to get behind the scenes at Parliament and to watch her hero in action. But getting what you want in the nation’s capital requires some fancy footwork. What they all experience in that week makes them question their ambitions, their ideals and the value of democracy itself.

South Australian playwright Emily Steel (Euphoria) blows open the doors of Parliament House to unlock some devilish and dangerous truths in this new black comedy.

Director: Shannon Rush / Set and Costume Designer: Ailsa Patterson / Lighting Designer: Nigel Levings / Starring: Emily Taheny, Susie Youssef

DICTIONARY OF LOST WORDS

Adapted by Verity Laughton from the novel by Pip Williams

With Sydney Theatre Company

3-17 April

Dunstan Playhouse

Love. Eternal.

After sold out seasons in Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne, The Dictionary of Lost Words returns to Adelaide as part of a wider national tour throughout 2025.

In 1901, the word bondmaid was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. The Dictionary of Lost Words is the story of the girl who found it.

Motherless and ever curious, Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium - the “Scrippy”, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of lexicographers are gathering words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. She hides beneath the table and catches discarded words as they fall - words the men find irrelevant and unimportant...female words. Here begins Esme’s collection of her own dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.

Director: Jessica Arthur / Set Designer: Jonathon Oxlade / Costume Designer: Ailsa Paterson / Lighting Designer: Trent Suidgeest / Composer and Sound Designer: Max Lyandvert / Assistant Director: Shannon Rush / Starring: Arkia Ashraf, Rachel Burke, Ksenja Logos, Angela Nica Sullen, Shannen Alyce Quan.

LOOKING FOR ALIBRANDI

By Vidya Rajan
Based on the book by Melina Marchetta with Brink Productions

22-31 May

Dunstan Playhouse

It’s the last year of school and 17-year-old Josephine Alibrandi can’t wait for her future to begin – if only she can get past the world of her Nonna, holding onto the values of the old country and the world of her Mum, full of care and secrets. It’s time to take her place in the real world, beyond her family, beyond being an Alibrandi.

But this is the year Josie gets to know her father. This is the year she falls in love. And this is the year she uncovers the truth – and finds the Alibrandi she has been searching for.

Three generations of women. The Italian-Australian experience. A trip back into the 1990s. A theatrical adaptation of the beloved Australian novel and groundbreaking film, will have its Adelaide premiere in 2025, directed by the new Artistic Director of Brink Productions, Stephen Nicolazzo.

Director: Stephen Nicolazzo/ Set and Costume Designer: Kate Davis / Lighting Designer: Katie Sfetkidis / Composer and Sound Designer: Daniel Nixon / Starring: Chris Asimos, Chanella Macri, Ashton Malcolm, Lucia Mastrantone, Jennifer Vuletic, Rilery Warner.

KIMBERLEY AKIMBO

Book and lyrics by David Lindsay-Abaire. Music by Jeanine Tesori.

8-19 July
Her Majesty’s Theatre

The Australian premiere of a Tony Award-winning new musical and a great adventure.

The new girl in town is making heads spin. You’ve got to move fast when you’re 16 going on 70. Kimberly Akimbo won five Tony awards including Best Musical, with music by Jeanine Tesori and book by David Lindsay-Abaire (Ripcord).

This Australian premiere, directed by outgoing Artistic Director, Mitchell Butel, stars Marina Prior, Casey Donovan, Nathan O’Keefe and Christie Whelan Browne.

New Jersey, 1999: from a sea of teen angst, unrequited crushes and popularity contests bursts Kimberly, a musical heroine like no other. Equal parts teen comedy, heist caper and unlikely love story, her rollercoaster journey shows that the tempo of your own song is yours to set. Born with a genetic rarity that means she ages at four times the rate of everyone else, Kimberly is a teen in mid-life form and living on borrowed time. She can cope with her dropkick dad and narcissistic mum – can’t spell ‘dysfunction’ without ‘fun’, right? But when her criminal aunt Debra shows up with a get-rich-quick scheme too good to be legal, Kimberly decides you’re only young once.

Director: Mitchell Butel / Musical Director: Kym Purling / Choreographer: Amy Campbell / Costumer Designer: Ailsa Paterson / Set Designer: Jonathon Oxlade / Starring: Casey Donovan, Alana Iannace, Nathan O’Keefe, Marina Prior, Christie Whelan Browne.

DEAR SON