Belvoir St Theatre in Surry Hills has announced its 2025 season – a sharply curated, eclectic nine-strong program that features Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, English author Max Porter, national treasure Helen Garner, Indian pastorals, plenty of fresh Australian works including Indigenous stories, and more.

“Belvoir is a great big ongoing unfinished story made up of all the stories we tell, have ever told, and are yet to tell. Every new show adds to this gargantuan decades-long group-improvisation,” said Belvoir’s artistic director Eamon Flack in a statement.

Highlights include the latest work from Western Sydney playwright S Shakthidharan, whose epic play Counting and Cracking – originally produced by Belvoir for Sydney Festival in 2019 – has just hit the stage in New York City, directed by Flack. Shakthidharan’s latest work, The Wrong Gods, takes us to India, where a mother and daughter farm the land in a valley near caves tracing 50,000 years of history and worship via cave paintings. The daughter wants more from her life, and audiences are forced to question the price of progress.

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Another heavy hitter is a stage adaptation of English author Max Porter’s beloved poetry-prose novel Grief is the Thing With Feathers. Guided by director Simon Phillips, the play follows two young boys whose mother has suddenly died, and the crow that arrives to help them heal.

Meanwhile, Big Girls Don’t Cry is another homegrown production, written by Gumbaynggirr/Wiradjuri woman Dalara Williams and starring Megan Wilding, Stephanie Somerville, Nic English and Bryn Chapman-Parish, as well as Williams herself. It tells the story of three funny, fierce Indigenous women living in Redfern in 1996, dealing with racism and police harassment in the lead up to the Deb Ball – when everything changes.

Another electric Indigenous story, Jacky, kicks off the 2025 season, following a young Aboriginal man who has made a life for himself in Melbourne, before his brother arrives and everything starts to unravel.

The program isn’t just about straight-up plays: there’s Meow Meow’s the Red Shoes, a joyous melding of music and dance led by actor and dancer Meow Meow. There’s also Song of First Desire, the English-language debut of a Spanish play, and an adaptation of Helen Garner’s potent novel Spare Room starring the consummate Judy Davis. Plus, Virginia Woolf’s time-travelling, gender-defying novel Orlando makes it to the Belvoir stage, as does a Flack-directed take on Shakespeare’s King Lear.

Subscriptions are now on sale for Belvoir’s 2025 season.

belvoir.com.au/