La Boite sets the stage for star-studded season
Five shows. Two world premieres. Two homecomings. Our finest theatrical talent. La Boite invites Brisbane to see things differently in 2027.
In the mix of a star-studded 2027 season, celebrated Australian theatre director Neil Armfield returns to La Boite’s Roundhouse Theatre after a 17-year absence to direct acclaimed actor Darren Gilshenan in a gripping new political thriller.
Armfield leads an impressive assembly of Australian theatrical talent in a La Boite season featuring two world premieres, two much-anticipated homecomings and a major Queensland premiere.
The five-show program brings together three of Queensland’s leading stage actors for Sue Smith’s adaptation of Charlotte Wood’s The Weekend; sees the return of Naomi Price and The Little Red Company’s hit show Lady Beatle; reunites Steven Oliver and Michael Griffiths for Bigger & Blacker 2.0; and introduces a wickedly funny new work from internationally acclaimed playwright Anchuli Felicia King.
La Boite acting CEO Ian Prowse says the 2027 season reflects the company’s commitment to bringing ambitious theatre to Brisbane while looking ahead to its next chapter.
“This season brings together established Australian artists, emerging talent and bold new Australian writing, while celebrating the work and relationships that make La Boite such a special part of Brisbane’s cultural landscape,” says Prowse.
La Boite’s 2027 season opens with the Queensland premiere of The Weekend, (March 6-27), based on Wood’s internationally bestseller. Under the direction of Caroline Dunphy, three of Queensland’s most accomplished performers – Andrea Moor, Christen O’Leary and Carita Farrer Spencer – unite on the Roundhouse stage as lifelong friends Jude, Wendy and Adele. Gabriel Wighton joins them, making his mainstage debut, as part of the Assembly Pathways program.
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Reunited at the beach house of their recently deceased friend Sylvie, the women face an uncomfortable task – clearing out the home before it sells. It is Christmas, the temperature is climbing and, without the woman who held their friendship together, decades of assumptions and unspoken truths begin to shift.
The Weekend is a funny, fierce and unsentimental portrait of friendship, ageing and the layers of love built over a lifetime.
Next, one of La Boite’s biggest homegrown hits returns with The Little Red Company’s Lady Beatle (April 14-24), playing the Roundhouse stage 10 years after its world premiere. Created by Adam Brunes and Naomi Price, the production follows the enigmatic Lady Beatle, a woman who seems to know John, Paul, George and Ringo, the stories behind their songs and what becoming The Beatles cost.
Green Room Award-winner Price fronts a killer live band through Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Eleanor Rigby, Blackbird, Here Comes the Sun and other Beatles hits in a production that is part-rock concert, part-cabaret and part-magical mystery tour. Price says she is thrilled to bring Lady Beatle home to the theatre where it all began.
“Lady Beatle was made for the Roundhouse,” she says. “There’s something about that beautiful, intimate space, with the audience wrapped around you and the band in full flight, that makes the show absolutely sing.
“We’ve taken her to more than 50 venues nationwide since she burst onto the stage at La Boite, but nothing compares to performing the show on home ground. Ten years on, I can’t wait to bring her home and share that magic with Brisbane audiences all over again.”
The homecoming continues when Stephen Oliver and Michael Griffiths return to the Roundhouse for a special NAIDOC Week season of Bigger & Blacker 2.0 (July 7-10).
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First seen at La Boite in 2021 before going on to the Sydney Opera House then Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne International Comedy Festival and a regional Queensland tour, Bigger & Blacker 2.0 puts the irrepressible Oliver – star and writer of ABC’s Black Comedy and self-declared “Faboriginal” – centre stage.
With Helpmann Award-winner Griffiths at the piano, Oliver moves between comedy, cabaret, music and spoken word to explore love, loss, sex, success and the complicated business of being “a minority within a minority”.
Springtime will bring the first of La Boite’s two world premieres, with internationally acclaimed Thai-Australian playwright Anchuli Felicia King turning her razor-sharp eye to Australia’s obsession with property in Offset (September 11-25), a La Boite and Seymour Centre co-production.
Starring La Boite favourite Kimie Tsukakoshi (Congratulations, Get Rich!, The Poison of Polygamy), the wickedly funny two-hander begins when a real estate agent calls an apprentice electrician to her home at 2am and receives a $1060 bill. The agent has a house she cannot afford and an offset account; the electrician longs for a home of his own. What begins as an unlikely connection becomes King’s sharp examination of property, power, class and the stories people sell themselves to get ahead.
La Boite closes its 2027 season with the world premiere of Brisbane playwright Paul Hodge’s Calibre (November 6-27), bringing together two formidable talents in Australian theatre. Neil Armfield, whose celebrated career spans Belvoir Theatre, the Adelaide Festival, Broadway and London’s West End, will direct Darren Gilshenan in this one-man theatrical tour de force examining one of the most consequential episodes in modern Australian political history.
Six weeks into the prime ministership, John Howard (Gilshenan) decides the guns have to go. What follows is a pressure cooker of leaks, threats, backroom deals and political resistance as a new prime minister attempts to bring every state and territory with him, while facing some of the fiercest opposition from his own side.
Playwright Hodge (Joh for P.M.; Clinton) spent close to 100 hours interviewing those who were there, including Howard, state premiers, gun-control campaigners, gun-lobby representatives and families who lost loved ones at Port Arthur, distilling their accounts into a gripping solo theatrical thriller.
Armfield, whose landmark productions include Cloudstreet, The Secret River and Exit the King, says Calibre presented an extraordinary opportunity to examine the human forces behind a defining political decision.
“Paul has taken an extraordinary moment in Australia’s recent history and found a deeply theatrical way into it,” says Armfield. “What’s fascinating is the collision of personalities, convictions and political pressures, and the sheer difficulty of achieving change when the stakes are so high.
“To explore that through one actor is an enormous theatrical challenge and Darren is an exceptional performer to take it on. I’m delighted to be returning to La Boite with a new Australian work that has so much to say about leadership, tenacity and the choices that shape a country.”
La Boite’s 2027 season is on sale now.
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