Sydney Opera House

In 2010, Sydney Theatre Company presents twelve Main Stage productions across three venues. Playing in the Drama Theatre of Sydney Opera House are:

Optimism
Presented by Sydney Theatre Company, Sydney Festival, Malthouse Melbourne, Edinburgh International Festival

Brought up in the household of a powerful Baron, Candide (Frank Woodley) is a blissfully happy young man whose tutor, Pangloss (Barry Otto), has instilled in him the belief that ‘all is for the best’. But when his love for the Baron’s rosy-cheeked daughter is discovered, Candide is expelled from the land – forced to make his own way in the world. As he trudges across continents in search of his beloved the world he experiences is cruel and frequently brutal… Will it chip away at his insatiable optimism?

Following successful seasons in Melbourne and Edinburgh, Optimism, Tom Wright's adaptation of Voltaire's Candide, plays in the Drama Theatre as part of the 2010 Sydney Festival.

Honour
After thirty-two years of marriage, George (William Zappa) and Honor (Wendy Hughes) have achieved it all; the successful marriage, the family, the house, the garden. Honor - beautiful, intelligent and a promising writer in her youth - has been fulfilled by a life spent caring for her family and supporting George. Together the couple have weathered hard times, their lives becoming inextricably intertwined. However, Honor is to learn of the appalling fragility of love when George, enchanted by a stunning, young journalist, abandons both his wife and his marriage.

With extraordinary wit and great compassion, Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith questions the very nature of love: does it inevitably erode over time? Can it endure the terrible dichotomy between passion and perseverance?

Our Town  
It’s 1901. Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. Welcome to Our Town. A small American town like any other; simple, sleepy and cheerful. People here are like people anywhere else: they are born, they fall in love, they die. Ordinary people leading ordinary lives. Or so we might believe, until the Stage Manager – our guide for the evening – takes us on a tour of the town and we begin to glimpse how extraordinary even the most ordinary of lives can be.
 
Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play from 1938 makes an affecting philosophical case for relishing life in the here and now. Heart-warming and humorous, Our Town is a powerful call to appreciate life while we are in it.

The Grenade
By Tony McNamara
 
Someone has planted a grenade in the kitchen of the McTavish family home. Although the pin remains firmly in place, political consultant and man of the house Busby McTavish (Garry McDonald) has just exploded into a paranoid frenzy of security insecurity. No one is above suspicion. And in Busby’s line of work he could have any number of enemies.
 
A play for our times, The Grenade is the latest hilarious romp from Australian playwright, Tony McNamara. This whodunnit comedy of fidelity, marriage and inter-generational relationships mercilessly satirises our national obsession with security.