“Rediscovering your city differently has been absolutely one of the key pillars of my time here at Sydney Festival,” says Festival Director Olivia Ansell. “It’s something that I really wanted Sydneysiders and visitors to this city to experience. How can we tell authentically Australian stories, Sydney stories, Gadigal stories in unusual locations, in different ways?”
Just as previous editions of Ansell’s Sydney Festival have encouraged festival-goers to experience an underwater gig at an iconic swimming pool, transformed Sydney Town Hall into an indoor beach, and invited audiences into the Harry Seidler-designed Commercial Travellers’ Association Club in Martin Place (a building known colloquially as ‘the mushroom’) to experience lucid dreaming during an overnight stay, this year’s program once again invites audiences to see the familiar streets and gardens of the NSW capital anew.
Program highlights include an eclectic concert in Wendy Whiteley’s Secret Garden, an opportunity for adults to view the streets of Bankstown as seen through young people’s eyes in the audio walking tour Stories From Here, acrobatic delights beneath the Western Distributor in Darling Harbour with Swing! Circus (including the opportunity for paid trapeze lessons and free, drop-in circus skills workshops) and A Modern Murder (an immersive play based on a true crime story that’s set in the Darlinghurst Courthouse, where the original trial – a 1954 cause célèbre – was held).
“Shirley Beiger grew up in a sly grog household. Her mother, Edith Beiger, was one of the underworld figures of the day, in the same vein as Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh; however, she wanted Shirley to integrate into a normal life and marry up, so she used her underworld profits to send Shirley to [independent Anglican-run girls’ school] SCEGGS Darlinghurst. Shirley graduated, ran the daffodil counter part-time at David Jones, was a part-time model, and was dating a young man called Arthur Griffith, whose family was connected to the bookie industry – and Arthur was allegedly two-timing Shirley with a showgirl from the Latin Quarter, who he took on a date to Checkers nightclub,” Ansell explains.
Shirley and her mother drove to Checkers to confront Arthur, after putting a rifle in the back seat of their car, Ansell continues.
“I think they only wanted to go in and have a word with Arthur, but Arthur came out of the club and legend has it that Shirley was sitting in the back with the rifle in her duffel bag. She doesn’t know what happened. He tapped her on the shoulder and goodness me, the gun went off and Arthur was killed, and Shirley ran up the street in front of 200 witnesses.
“She did a year in Long Bay [Gaol] but she was a very Marilyn Monroe-esque young woman in Sydney in the early ‘50s. She was a model, a page three girl and she sold a lot of papers. And I think, to me, it was that interesting and often complex relationship between a court case and the media, which we’ve seen extensively in the last couple of years, which is so fascinating – and this court case sold papers morning, noon and night. It took off to hysterical proportions,” Ansell explains.
For A Modern Murder, playwright Melanie Tait (The Appleton Ladies’ Potato Race, A Broadcast Coup) and director Sheridan Harbridge (44 Sex Acts in One Week) return to the scene of Beiger’s original trial. The Darlinghurst Courthouse will be opened exclusively for the production’s Sydney Festival season with an immersive recreation of the sensational court case that had Australia on tenterhooks.
“It was pre-television, and so the buzz on the radio, the buzz on the street, the buzz in the newspapers, it was laps and shoulders – you couldn’t fit in the courtroom. An all-male jury which mum stacked. They found the most ‘charismatic’ lawyer, shall we say, and Shirley miraculously got off, citing that she just loved Arthur too much [to kill him],” Ansell laughs.
“I mean, it feels to me like a mix between the television show Rake, [Agatha Christie’s] Witness for the Prosecution and Sydney’s very own version of Chicago the musical!”
Grappling with colonialism
Crimes of a different sort are explored elsewhere in the Sydney Festival program, in productions such as Dark Noon, Antigone in the Amazon and As You Like It or The Land Acknowledgement, which collectively grapple with the fraught issue of colonialism and explore how colonised countries can move forward to reconciliation with First Peoples.
Exposing the brutality of the American Dream and co-directed by Denmark’s Tue Biering and South Africa’s Nhlanhla Mahlangu, the Edinburgh Fringe hit Dark Noon, which Ansell describes as “a deeply stinging satire”, sees a South African cast “replay the brutal events of the US’s formation as a catalogue of poverty, struggle, violence and pain” to quote The Guardian’s five-star review, turning the tables on the US’s self-mythologising and taking audiences on a raw, immersive ride through history.
Also confronting power, race and displacement are award-winning Swiss director Milo Rau’s Antigone in the Amazon, inspired by the 1996 massacre of members of the Landless Workers Movement by Brazilian police and examining the injustices suffered by Indigenous Brazilians in the face of government and corporate greed, and As You Like It or The Land Acknowledgement by Canadian First Nations provocateur Cliff Cardinal, a satirical and blackly comic monologue, which utilises Shakespeare as a vehicle to explore the reconciliation process between Indigenous communities and colonial settlers.
Ansell says such productions ask us to consider, “how we move forward, how we can have hope for tomorrow, how we can move through this as a society, what are the checks and balances? What are the great changes that need to occur?”
Curated by Sydney Festival’s Creative Artist in Residence, Jacob Nash, the First Nations-led Blak Out program introduces a new gathering space and expanded festival footprint with three weekends of conversation and events that celebrate the coming together of people, country, spirit and truths.
Alongside the Sydney premiere of Arrernte playwright Declan Furber Gillick’s critically acclaimed Jacky (a Melbourne Theatre Company production about a young Aboriginal man navigating the tensions between black and white culture that is co-presented with Belvoir) and the return of the contemplative ceremony Vigil: Truths, this year’s Blak Out program also includes conversations, album launches and the new work Plant a Promise, inspired by the devastating 2019 – 2020 fires and the changing climate.
A multi-format work that weaves together Indigenous knowledge and environmental science to share the importance of caring for Country, Plant a Promise has been conceived by choreographer and playwright Henrietta Baird and is presented in four parts: a dance performance and native planting held at Bangarra’s Studio Theatre, a Baya (fire) installation by the water at The Thirsty Mile, the Festival’s takeover of the Walsh Bay Arts Precinct, and yarns hosted Barangaroo Reserve as part of Vigil. Together, these four elements invite Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences to explore culture and environment, and to find connection in those spaces that colonial systems have tried to separate.
A deep and diverse program
Other highlights of the 2025 Sydney Festival include The Chronicles, a major new dance work by Melbourne-based choreographer Stephanie Lake (Colossus, Manifesto), featuring 12 dancers and a children’s choir; Afterworld, a requiem for Eurydice by choreographer Sue Healey and composer Laurence Pike, featuring five dancers on stage and pre-recorded footage of 109-year-old dancer Eileen Kramer as Eurydice; and Australian Theatre for Young People’s Converted! by comedy writer Vic Zerbst and composer Oliver John Cameron, a new musical comedy set in a gay conversion camp and celebrating the lives of queer teenagers.
The visual arts program includes a Pacific-led exhibition of new works from artists Latai Taumoepeau and Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta entitled Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania at Artspace, which utilises story, song, performance, action and activism to allow viewers to connect with communities living on the islands and atolls of the southern hemisphere and listen to their demands for greater climate justice; and the presence of Tongan-born and Western Sydney-raised artist, Telly Tuita, as the Festival’s 2025 Visual Artist in Residence.
Tuita’s ‘Tongpop’ aesthetic (blending the artist’s Polynesian diasporic experience, nostalgic pop-culture references and memories of his Tongan homeland) will be on show throughout The Thirsty Mile takeover of Walsh Bay, enveloping indoor and outdoor spaces across the precinct.
“The potential with [the Walsh Bay precinct] as a hub is huge, and … with all these different, interesting exhibition nooks and crannies, it just begs to have an artist respond to it. And the beauty of having an Artist in Residence, and somebody as collaborative and collegiate and so inspiring as Telly – his artwork is like poetry. It’s like he’s taken a love letter to the city and married all those words to different spaces,” says Ansell.
“Telly comes from a long line of navigators, Tuita means ‘to navigate’ and that’s obviously part of his rich Tongan culture. And so looking at that body of water in Walsh Bay and in talking to Telly, we talked about other maritime histories of the area, and fast forwarding, we have the SS John Oxley which he is going to subvert and take over with his Tongpop aesthetic, so that will sit there moored in all its glory between the two piers.”
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As well as new works, Sydney Festival also celebrates the past thanks to Wiradjuri Yuin actor and Redfern resident, Angeline Penrith.
“She has curated Redfern Renaissance, which is a series of workshops, discussion panels and play readings that celebrate the history of the National Black Theatre,” Ansell explains.
“The National Black Theatre ran in Redfern from 1972 to 1977 and Angeline is going to take a deep dive into some of the company’s plays: The Cake Man by Robert Merritt and Here Comes the N-word by Gerry Bostock, so that’s really cool that that’s happening.”
Acknowledging the Festival’s 49-year history (next year’s Sydney Festival, the 50th edition, will be overseen by incoming Festival Director Kris Nelson) and also in recognition of the current cost of living crisis, early bird tickets priced at $49 will be available for A Reserve and General Admission seats across all ticketed shows until 2 December (or until sold out).
“It’s really important for Sydney Festival that audiences can engage with the Festival in the way in which they know, remember and love and we want that to be ongoing. So this year, to celebrate our 49th edition of Sydney Festival, we have a special $49 offer where you can access some of the best seats in the house for $49 from launch day until 2 December… And the reason we’ve been able to do that is we’ve modelled this from the very get-go,” Ansell tells ArtsHub.
“When we sat down and modelled the ‘25 program, making sure that we responded to cost of living was first and foremost what we wanted to do. So we’ve really factored the festival-goer in mind, and we hope that people can now feel like they can get to plenty of shows this year – and they can also check out our free program. We’ve got 12 nights of pumping free music down at our Festival Hub, and there’s also free music elsewhere in the program, including at the Australian Museum over three Wednesday nights. In total there are over 50 free events across the Festival. So now you can navigate and engineer yourself a new, fantastic summer without it impinging on the wallet.
“Balance between the free and ticketed is always so hugely important, because people look to arts festivals to access interesting conversations and big bold ideas, and this year we’ll once again do just that,” Ansell concludes.
The 49th Sydney Festival runs from 4-26 January 2025. Learn more about the Festival program.
