Belvoir starts 2019 in epic fashion with a brand new play called Counting & Cracking by S. Shakthidharan, co-produced with the Sydney and Adelaide Festivals, which will be performed by 16 actors in Sydney Town Hall. Among the other eight plays there are a further three world premieres – a drama about the Packer family, a musical about teenagers, and a play about six Indigenous women going back to country.

“I was thinking a lot about new work,” says Belvoir’s Artistic Director Eamon Flack of the season. “A lot of our biggest successes in the past couple of years have been Australian works. But also I was thinking about how everything is changing so quickly at the moment and everyone is a bit unsettled, and so I really wanted it to be a season of shows that were from ‘now’, that are from the period that we are living through, so only one play is older than five years old,” he says.

“Everything is quite new and fresh, but they are not necessarily plays about the horrors that we are living through now. A lot of them are plays about humans succeeding...