The planets have aligned for Malthouse Theatre’s 2018 season, with a powerhouse program of uncompromising theatre with more than a few allegorical nods to the geopolitical turbulence making headlines around the world. Artistic Director Matthew Lutton’s selection continues to cement Malthouse as Australia’s leading contemporary theatre hub. 2018 will see five world premieres and two Australian premieres on the theatre’s stages, as well as revivals of local indie hits and new productions of significant works by modern masters.

The most ambitious production of the season – and arguably of Lutton’s Malthouse tenure to date – will be a stage adaptation of visionary Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier’s psychological apocalypse Melancholia. Perhaps the most emotionally sophisticated and surprisingly intimate end of the world movie, it tells the story of two sisters attempting to reconciling a complex relationship as a rogue planet hurtles to destroy the Earth, and topically, it asks the question, what’s the use of wealth and privilege when the end is nigh? Melbourne-based playwright Declan Greene, the co-founder of queer theatre company Sisters Grimm whose gender bending farce The Homosexuals received rave reviews in Sydney after a rocky debut season in Melbourne, will be reimagining von Trier’s narrative for the stage.

Lutton will be adding another major new production to his canon of adaptations in 2018, returning to an Australian narrative for the first time since his critical smash hit interpretation of Picnic At Hanging Rock in 2015. The same team behind Picnic will collaborate on a newly penned adaptation of Peter Carey’s bestselling ode to existential crises, Bliss. Mark Leonard Winter will star as Harry Joy, a man who becomes convinced that the world is hell after a near death experience. Fans of Picnic At Hanging Rock will be also pleased to hear that it will also be receiving a revival, as the first work to kick the season off in February.

Immigration and multiculturalism have become the most divisive issues in the political zeitgeist, and as an apparent response to this, there are several productions in the 2018 season that tackle ideas of racial identity and cultural sensitivity.

Another of the season’s world premieres comes from outspoken, defiant, and utterly hilarious indigenous playwright Nakkiah Lui, who is once again bringing her unique brand of blistering satire to Malthouse in a collaboration with Declan Greene. Blackie Blackie Brown: The Traditional Owner Of Death offers a wickedly comic examination of Aboriginal reconciliation through the lens of the super hero genre.

At the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, Jada Alberts astonishing break-out play Brothers Wreck offers another Indigenous story, about the impact of suicide on a community in Darwin. This powerfully uncompromising play reveals a story that is all too common amongst Aboriginal communities in Australia.

Australian-Hmong playwright Michele Lee’s Going Down is another new work getting its debut at Malthouse in 2018. This Sex And The City inspired co-production with Sydney Theatre Company, directed by Leticia Caceres, will take the audience on a romantic romp through the streets of Melbourne.

Director Janice Muller, who stunned Melbourne audiences earlier this year with her breathtakingly rich production of Alice Birch’s Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again., will direct an adaptation of Osamah Sami’s funny yet frank memoir Good Muslim Boy, exploring the idea of how we absorb or reject our parents’ values.

British playwright and poet Sarah Kane was just 28 when she committed suicide in 1999. In her brief life she penned six plays, the first being Blasted, a hyper violent surrealist study of the moral ambiguity of war. Shocking, unflinching, and described by one critic when it premiered in 1995 as a "disgustig feast of filth," this is a production that promises to be one of the riskiest and boldest on any stage in Australia next year. 

While there is much in Lutton’s 2018 selection intended to be thought-provoking, this is not a season of doom and gloom. Two shows, in particular, will have their audiences rolling in the aisles – although, as you might expect, they too have much to put a spring in the synapses. UK comic Phoebe Waller-Bridge will tour her award-winning show Fleabag to Malthouse as part of next year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and three of Australia’s top comics, Mish Grigor, Natalie Rose and the Barry Award-winning marvel behind comedy masterpiece Wild Bore, Zoe Coombs-Marr, will revive their poignant and pant-wetting homage to a decade of friendship, Ich Nibber Dibber.

The Malthouse's 2018 will make its most overt political gestures when it welcomes two major theatre troupes from overseas. First, British theatre mavericks Complicite – the company behind the mind bending Amazonian odyssey The Encounter which packed houses in Sydney, Perth and Melbourne earlier this year – will deliver the Australian premiere of A Pacifist’s Guide To The War On Cancer. Returning to Melbourne, Belarus Free Theatre, the extraordinary firebrand collective of political activists who face imprisonment – or worse – in their native country, will give the world premiere of Trustees. This incendiary challenge to the mechanics of authority and the malignancy of censorship, will feature five extraordinary Australian performers: Gregory Fryer, Sophie Ross, Niharika Senapati, Hazem Shammas and Daniel Schlusser. Belarus Free Theatre will also give the Australian premiere of Generation Jeans, an uproariously defiant work about the clothing and music banned in Belarus in the Soviet era.