Aussie screen icon leads the charge for QTC’s season 2027
Queensland Theatre Company launches season 2027 today and it’s a spicy year ahead – with David Wenham up front.
From David Wenham on the frontline of every war ever fought to the stage debut of Australia’s most beloved sleuth Miss Fisher – alongside a cutthroat Sondheim classic, among other offerings – Queensland Theatre has a big 2027 planned.
Launched today, the second season for QTC artistic director Daniel Evans presents a line-up of some of Australia’s most celebrated performers, alongside local talent creating epic new works.
Season 2027 also marks an increasingly ambitious national chapter for QTC, with partnerships spanning Sydney Theatre Company, Melbourne Theatre Company, Jones Theatrical Group, Belvoir St Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse and JUTE Theatre Cairns.
“These partnerships mean that we can present the kind of theatre we believe Queensland audiences deserve,” says Evans. “Our test for this season became very simple – swing even bigger, punch harder and make theatre irrefutable.”
Opening the season, award-winning Australian actor David Wenham makes his Queensland stage debut in An Iliad, reprising the extraordinary performance that earned a sold-out Sydney Theatre Company season and a string of five-star reviews.
Wenham plays the Poet, a compelling narrator to recount the Trojan War – and the legacy of violence in every war since, until humanity finally learns to overcome its appetite for violence – in an intimate and dynamic contemporary reimagining of Homer’s ancient epic.
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Shakespeare’s most famous love story is then reimagined through Indigenous ways of storytelling in the premiere of Romeo & Juliet. Adapted and directed by QTC head of First Nations theatre Isaac Drandic and Kamarra Bell-Wykes and featuring an ensemble of local performers and designers, the production blends Shakespeare’s text with Turrbal language, song, movement and traditional and contemporary First Nations storytelling to imagine an ancestral world where Country holds the memory of a people.
In April, 2027, Australia’s most stylish private detective makes her stage debut in the world premiere of Death by Deck Chair: A Miss Fisher Murder Mystery. Created by Deb Cox and Fiona Eagger, the team behind the international hit television series Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, this new murder mystery has been written especially for the stage – an entirely original adventure making its world premiere.
The Australian premiere of Stereophonic in May will throw open the doors of a 1970s Californian recording studio in David Adjmi’s record-breaking, backstage fly-on-the-wall docu-drama, also the most Tony Award-nominated play in Broadway history.
Directed by Evans (with the endorsement of Adjmi) and featuring original live music by Grammy Award winner Will Butler of Arcade Fire, the production is set in a replica 1972 recording studio and offers a glimpse into the cost of creative genius as it follows five musicians on the cusp of superstardom. The five spend a year trying to make the album that will define them and an entire generation, without destroying the band, their relationships or themselves.
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One of the most celebrated Australian plays of recent years arrives on Queensland stages for the first time with S. Shakthidharan’s Counting and Cracking, directed by Eamon Flack. Spanning four generations and moving between Sri Lanka and Australia, this epic brings 16 actors to the stage in a sweeping story of love, political strife, home, exile and the ties between parents and children.
Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd will transform the Bille Brown Theatre into the grimy, gruesome world of Victorian London in an immersive new production directed by Daniel Evans and Bridget Boyle. Serving up black comedy, gothic thrills and a generous helping of murder and meat pies in the eight-time Tony Award-winning musical, QTC favourite Naomi Price steps into the role she has been dying to play, Mrs Lovett.
Queensland Premier’s Drama Award winner Alberto Di Troia takes audiences from Australia to rural Italy in My Roman Empire, a darkly comic political satire about family, identity and what happens when a young queer writer goes looking for his Italian roots and discovers his long-lost relatives are not the kind you want to uncover.
Rounding out the season, a team of Queensland’s best female theatre makers, including award-winning playwrights Maxine Mellor and Kathryn Marquet, redefine some of literature’s most beloved sisters in the world premiere of a spirited new adaptation of Little Women. Featuring Queensland actors led by Matilda Award-winner Courtney Cavallaro, Louisa May Alcott’s story of the March sisters finds fresh fire on stage, celebrating sisterhood, ambition and four young women determined to decide for themselves what their lives might become.
For Evans, the enormous scope and scale of the season is precisely the point.
“Our audiences are some of the best in the country – generous and daring – and this whole season is really conceived for them – whether it’s your first time in a theatre, or you’re a seasoned die-hard or you want your theatre served on the cutting edge,” says Evans.
“Each play is event theatre. In 2027, we are not holding back. We are turning up the stakes. Turning up the scale. Turning up the feeling. This is a season filled with ambitious worlds, summoned by incredible artists and populated with characters who are going to bring you to laughter, tears, and the edge of your seat.”
QTC’s 2027 season is now on sale.
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